I couldn't let it go. 
Urban Institute: Health Policy
Urban Institute reports from: Health Policy - The Urban Institute is a nonprofit nonpartisan policy research and educational organization established to examine the social, economic, and governance problems facing the nation.

• Who Has Insurance and Who Does Not in the District of Columbia?
  DC fares better than the nation as a whole in the share of its population that is uninsured. Lower rates of employer-sponsored coverage are more than offset by higher rates of public coverage. The District's relatively generous Medicaid eligibility standards, and the DC HealthCare Alliance, a locally funded coverage program, contribute to the high share of publicly insured residents. Although all low-income individuals are eligible for either Medicaid or the Alliance, some 66,000 residents remain uninsured. These are among the findings of this data brief on insurance status in DC by age, employment, income, family status, and health status.
• Can California's Proposed Coverage Reform Be a Model for the District of Columbia?
  The ongoing debate in California over two competing 2007 proposals for universal health coverage highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of the current insurance system in the District of Columbia as a platform for coverage expansion. The District's advantages include its relatively small uninsured population and existing mechanisms for administering a public coverage program tied to income. But its fiscal base is relatively small compared with California's, its largely unregulated insurance market could lead to severe adverse selection problems for new programs, and it is at much greater risk for border-crossing by both individuals and businesses in response to reform.
• Are Children Accessing and Using Needed Mental Health Care Services?
  This brief presents data on mental health coverage benefits and enrollees' access to and use of mental health services through the Healthy Kids program in San Mateo County, California. The prevalence of mental health conditions among enrollees is similar to national levels, but despite the generous mental health benefits offered under the program, only a small fraction of enrollees with mental health conditions receive care. Reasons why more children do not use mental health services are explored. The brief also shows that enrollees with mental health needs have higher use of other health services compared to all Healthy Kids members.
• Quality of Early Childhood Health Care in the Los Angeles Healthy Kids Program
  The Los Angeles Healthy Kids program was created in 2003 to provide health insurance to uninsured children ages 05 years in families with household income below 300 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) who are ineligible for SCHIP or Medicaid. A quality of care survey sampled parents of 538 children ages 1272 months enrolled in the program for at least one year. Results show that quality of preventive care for children in Healthy Kids has similar patterns as care for children in low-income households, both in California and nationally. Content of preventive care is well below American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations, although it is consistent with statewide and national levels of care.
• Why Health Insurance Is Important
  Having health insurance is important for several reasons. Uninsured people receive less medical care and less timely care, they have worse health outcomes, and lack of insurance is a fiscal burden for them and their families. Moreover, the benefits of expanding coverage outweigh the costs for added services. Safety-net care from hospitals and clinics improves access to care but does not fully substitute for health insurance. These findings are supported by much research, although some cautions are appropriate in using these results.
• Increasing Health Insurance Coverage of Workers in Small Firms: Challenges and Strategies : Testimony before the Finance Committee United States Senate
  Small employers face substantial disadvantages relative to large employers when providing health insurance to their workers. These problems can largely be summarized as higher administrative costs of insurance, limited ability to spread health care risk, and a workforce with lower wages. But the primary barrier to coverage for workers in small firms is being low-income; workers in small firms are more than twice as likely as those in large firms to have family income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Significant inroads into reducing the uninsured in this population will require income-related subsidization of insurance coverage.
• Can a Child Health Insurance Tax Credit Serve as an Effective Substitute for SCHIP Expansion?
  As the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) has come up for reauthorization, the coverage of children with incomes above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) has become a contentious issue. Proposals have surfaced that would subsidizing the purchase of health insurance for children between 200 and 300 percent of the FPL using tax credits and the private insurance market, as an alternative to allowing states to continue enrolling these children in SCHIP coverage. This analysis compares the family financial burdens of covering children under SCHIP and under a refundable tax credit providing a $1400 per child subsidy.
• Can the President's Health Care Tax Proposal Serve as an Effective Substitute for SCHIP Expansion?
  The Bush Administration has proposed using a tax deduction approach to expand health insurance coverage instead of expanding SCHIP coverage for more children. On October 3, the president vetoed the SCHIP reauthorization bill passed by Congress. This brief compares the financial burden for families associated with purchasing coverage for their children under the President's proposal and under the SCHIP reauthorization bill and discusses the likely impacts on uninsurance among children. We find that the financial burdens for families between 150 and 300 percent of the federal poverty level would be much higher under the tax deduction approach than under SCHIP.
• Concerns about Parents Dropping Employer Coverage to Enroll in SCHIP Overlook Issues of Affordability
  One of the more prominent concerns in the SCHIP reauthorization debate is that many children enrolling in the program could have been insured through their parents' employers. However, concern about parents dropping employer coverage to enroll their children in SCHIP typically ignores the affordability of that coverage. We show that families' spending burden is, on average, lower under public insurance than under employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), especially for the lowest-income families. For families in which children are covered by Medicaid or SCHIP, out-of-pocket spending is, on average, 4 to 5 percent of their income. However, for families in which children have ESI for a full year, the out-of-pocket spending burden is higher, ranging from 12.9 percent of income for families below 150 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) to 6.1 percent for families between 250-400 percent of FPL.
• What Happened to Health Insurance Coverage of Children and Adults in 2006?
  On August 28, 2007, the Census Bureau reported that the number of nonelderly uninsured had increased by 2.1 million in 2006. Of the 2.1 million non-elderly uninsured, 1.4 million were adults and 710,000 were children (age 18 and under). In this paper we show that children experienced declines in employer-sponsored coverage at all income levels. The largest growth in uninsured children (48%) occurred among those in middle-income families (between 200 and 399% of poverty) because there was no increase in Medicaid and SCHIP to offset the decline in employer sponsored coverage.
• SCHIP Reauthorization : How Will Low-Income Kids Benefit under House and Senate Bills?
  In July 2007, bills to reauthorize the State Children's Health Insurance Program were passed in both the House and the Senate. One question that has been raised is how well the bills target low-income children. In this brief, Genevieve Kenney and colleagues estimate that the proportion of children below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) covered by the bills is 70% or higher. The share of uninsured children below 200 percent of the FPL who would gain coverage is estimated to be even higher (78 to 85 percent).
• Getting Ready for Reform : Insurance Coverage and Access to and Use of Care in Massachusetts in Fall 2006
  In April 2006, Massachusetts enacted a health care reform bill that seeks to move the state to (almost) universal coverage through a combination of Medicaid expansions, subsidized private health insurance coverage, and insurance reforms. As part of an evaluation of the impacts of the state's reform effort, we conducted a baseline survey of 3010 adults aged 18 to 64 years old in Massach