As enrollment in ACA-compliant coverage becomes more challenging, insurance products and arrangements that do not meet ACA standards will become more prevalent.

If incomes don’t keep pace with the increase in health care costs, paying for employer coverage could consume increasingly ...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes a mandate for every person to obtain health insurance to guard against adverse selection in the markets. This occurs when enrollees are disproportionately older ...

This brief was originally published in December 2020 and updated in July 2025. In 2023, at a time when maternal mortality was declining worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the ...

Consumer choice in health care has been advanced as a pathway for improving the quality and affordability of health care. The idea is that when people have access to full and accurate information ...

Introduction: How Does Medicaid Expansion Affect State Budgets? Is expanding eligibility for Medicaid a good deal for states? This question has loomed over state policymakers for more than a decade.

Critiques of ERISA’s preemption provision focus on its unpredictable breadth and its unintended consequences for regulation of health benefits. ERISA supplies relatively few federal rules for health ...

People’s health also varies markedly across and within states, as does access to health services and overall quality of care. 5 Large racial and ethnic health inequities, driven by factors both inside ...

Medicare Advantage offers Medicare benefits through private insurance plans, as an alternative to traditional Medicare. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that ...

The United States spends twice as much per person on health as the average of peer nations. 1 A number of studies have concluded that high prices are a major driver of this “excess” spending. 2 A ...

The article is part of a partnership between the Commonwealth Fund and the Bassett Research Institute in Cooperstown, N.Y., to explore innovative approaches to the health care challenges facing rural ...

New estimates from the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey, 2014, indicate that 23 percent of 19-to-64-year-old adults who were insured all year—or 31 million people—had such high ...