Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Covering New Americans - A Review of Federal and State Policies Related to Immigrant Eligibility and Access to Publicly Funded Health Insurance
From the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, in Adobe Acrobat format, "This brief provides an overview of health coverage challenges facing immigrants, the federal rules regarding immigrants’ eligibility for Medicaid and SCHIP, and state efforts to provide replacement coverage for immigrants who are ineligible for Medicaid and SCHIP."  
  

Medicaid Coverage for Poor Adults - A Potential Building Block for Bipartisan Health Reform
Paper by Stan Dorn of the Economic and Social Research Institute - "This paper explores whether giving state Medicaid programs increased flexibility to cover uninsured, poor adults could be one element of a broader, bipartisan expansion in health coverage. Among households with incomes below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), million working-age adults now lack coverage, comprising 27 percent of the uninsured."  
  

Treatment of Anxiety Increases, But Some Groups Left Out
Psychiatric News story - "Although more Americans are being treated for anxiety than in the past, there is still room for improvement—especially in the case of African Americans, Hispanics, and people with less education. Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent psychiatric conditions in the United States, yet people with anxiety disorders have tended to be under-diagnosed and undertreated. Now there is some good news: The outpatient treatment of people with such conditions nearly doubled between 1987 and 1999—from 0.43 per 100 Americans to 0.83 per 100 Americans, a highly significant difference. This finding has emerged from a study headed by Mark Olfson, M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and reported in the September Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. "  
  

MCOs Still Not Getting Mental Health Care Right
Psychiatric News story - "Managed care plans are doing a better job of providing quality treatment for many conditions—but not for mental illness. Managed care plans that publicly report performance data showed significant gains in quality of care last year on several critical measures, but no gains were recorded on key measures in the treatment of mental illness, according to a report by the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA). The NCQA's annual report, 'State of Health Care Quality,' found that performance improvements recorded last year among the 563 managed care plans that reported their results were among the largest ever. These plans cover about 69 million people and represent a subsection of the broader health care system, according to the NCQA." See also the full report, in Adobe Acrobat format.