All Blog Entries

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Raising Medicaid Primary Care Rates: Next Steps for States

5/24/2012 - The Department of Health and Human Services recently released long-awaited proposed regulations for implementing the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid primary care rate increase. This post provides takeaways from the proposed rule and suggestions for implementation.

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State Health Insurance Exchange Legislation: A Progress Report

5/22/2012 - This blog post by the Fund's Sara Collins and Tracy Garber provides a picture, as of May 2012, of where states stand in establishing the legal authority for their insurance exchanges.

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Measuring the Success of Medical Homes: Recommendations from the PCMH Evaluators' Collaborative

5/18/2012 - There is an urgent need for rigorous data to strengthen the evidence base of the medical home model. In an effort to harness and share lessons from the many disparate medical home pilots and evaluations under way, The Commonwealth Fund established the Patient-Centered Medical Home Evaluators’ Collaborative in 2009.

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State Scorecard on Long-Term Services and Supports: What Distinguishes High- from Low-Ranking States?

5/9/2012 - Last September, the AARP Public Policy Institute, The Commonwealth Fund, and The SCAN Foundation released the first-ever State Scorecard on Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS). A new set of case studies provides insights into why certain states ranked high, low, or somewhere in between.

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Many Americans Facing Breaks in Health Insurance Coverage

4/19/2012 - People who have gaps in insurance coverage struggle to regain coverage quickly, according to a new brief based on the 2011 Commonwealth Fund Insurance Tracking Survey.

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ACOs: Making Sure We Learn from Experience

4/12/2012 - The goals of accountable care—supporting providers' efforts to work together to achieve better care, better health, and lower costs—are compelling. But translating principles into practice requires learning. Elliott Fisher and Stephen Shortell explore the challenges in learning from ACOs' early experiences.

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A Closer Look at the Pioneers

4/12/2012 - The Commonwealth Fund offers a number of resources to learn about how several of the Pioneer ACOs went about implementing patient-centered coordinated care for their patient population.

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Celebrating Two Years of Progress

3/23/2012 - In a new blog post, Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis offers a few reminders of why the United States so urgently needs the Affordable Care Act.

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The Value of Public Reporting and Transparency

3/19/2012 - The Commonwealth Fund's Anne-Marie Audet argues that public reporting programs such as Hospital Compare have a vital role to play in spurring and monitoring quality improvement at the system and physician levels.

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Improving Health Care from the Ground Up

3/14/2012 - The latest report in a series of Commonwealth Fund scorecards that highlight stark differences in health care across the country ranks 306 communities on 43 measures of health system performance.

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The Small Business Health Insurance Exchanges: Opportunities and Challenges

2/29/2012 - A collection of papers in Health Affairs, and a companion Commonwealth Fund webinar, provided key insights for states working to design health insurance exchanges. This post captures highlights from the presentations and Q&A.

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The Care Coordination Imperative: Responding to the Needs of People with Chronic Diseases

2/21/2012 - The Commonwealth Fund's Anne-Marie Audet, M.D., and Shreya Patel, M.P.H., call for changes in health care delivery to respond to the growing prevalence of chronic illness in the U.S.

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Making the SHOP Exchanges Work

2/8/2012 - Many small employers—which make up the vast majority of American businesses—struggle to afford and manage health insurance for their employees. Timothy Jost discusses how the SHOP exchanges will make it easier for small employers to offer affordable plans.

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Achieving Equity in the Health System: The Commonwealth Fund's Vulnerable Populations Program

1/31/2012 - Vulnerable populations have more difficulty obtaining health care, receive worse care, and experience poorer health outcomes than other groups. This blog post looks at the new Vulnerable Populations program, which aims to help achieve equity in the U.S. health system.

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Bending the Health Care Cost Curve: New Era in American Health Care?

1/18/2012 - Health care spending in 2009 and 2010 grew at the slowest rates in 50 years. This startling news was largely attributed to the shrinking economy. In a new blog post, Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis suggests that lower longer-term projections point to a shift in the health system.

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