U.S. Healthcare Quality And Disparities
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released its 2021 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report, which details the state of healthcare quality and disparities in the United States. Additionally, improvements in HIV and colon cancer care, nursing home care, and medication prescribing to older adults are identified. The report also indicates that more work needs to be performed to address disparities in important areas. Among the findings are the following:
The numbers of individuals covered by health insurance and those who have a usual source of healthcare have increased significantly.
Personal spending on health insurance and healthcare services decreased for those under age 65 with public insurance and increased for holders of private insurance coverage.
Access to dental care and oral healthcare services remains low and has not substantially improved, particularly for individuals who have low income or who live in rural areas.
A multiyear rise in opioid-related hospitalizations had been tapering off prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the opioid crisis has worsened markedly since then. Suicide death rates were rising in all groups for more than a decade before the pandemic. Since then, suicide deaths have decreased in White populations, but continue to rise in racial and ethnic minority populations. Limited access to substance abuse and mental health treatment may have contributed to these crises.
Although Black, Hispanic, American Indian, and Alaska Native communities have experienced substantial improvements in healthcare quality, significant disparities in all domains of quality persist. Even when rates of improvement in quality exceeded those experienced by White Americans, the improvements have not been enough to eliminate disparities. The report can be obtained here.
State Trends In Employer Premiums And Deductibles, 2010–2020
Employer health insurance coverage has been relatively stable in recent years, falling only slightly during the COVID-19 pandemic. That news for the most part is encouraging, but costs for this coverage are on the rise. Unfortunately, the increase is constituting a larger share of workers’ paychecks. A new Commonwealth Fund report analyzing trends in employer plan premiums and deductibles across all states finds that over the last decade, incomes have not kept pace with health insurance costs, which are driven largely by high prices for drugs and health care services. In 37 states, premium contributions and deductibles together consumed as much as 10% or more of median household income in 2020, up from just 10 states a decade earlier. For single and family insurance policies, the average total cost of premiums and potential deductible spending ranged from a low of $6,528 in Hawaii to a high of more than $9,000 in five states, including Florida and Texas. The report can be obtained here.
Medicare Beneficiaries’ Use Of Telehealth In 2020
A new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) found that massive increases in the use of telehealth helped maintain some health care access during the COVID-19 pandemic, with specialists like behavioral health providers seeing the highest telehealth utilization relative to other providers. The report, which was produced by researchers in the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) analyzes Medicare fee for service (FFS) data in 2019 and 2020 and also highlights that telehealth services were accessed more in urban areas than rural communities. Black Medicare beneficiaries were less likely than White beneficiaries to use telehealth. The share of Medicare visits conducted through telehealth in 2020 increased 63-fold, from approximately 840,000 in 2019 to 52.7 million. States with the highest use of telehealth in 2020 included Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Connecticut. States with the lowest use of telehealth in 2020 included Tennessee, Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The report can be obtained here.