Employer health insurance continues to be the primary source of insurance coverage for the majority of the U.S. population. More than half of U.S. residents under age 65 — about 158 million people — get their health insurance through an employer, either their own or a family member’s. Two recent studies by the Commonwealth Fund […]

As some leading Democrats push a bolder vision for delivering on the party’s decades-long aspiration of universal health care, intraparty dissonance threatens to derail that effort before it has even begun, with establishment Democrats and progressives sparring over how to satiate the appetite for dramatic overhaul without alienating Americans fearful of disruption. Support for “Medicare […]

For a patient’s knee replacement, Medicare will pay a hospital $17,000. The same hospital can get more than twice as much, or about $37,000, for the same surgery on a patient with private insurance. Or take another example: One hospital would get about $4,200 from Medicare for removing someone’s gallbladder. The same hospital would get […]

Today, 25 percent of all caregivers of elderly are adult children.  However, while the parents of the Baby Boom generation had three children per household on average, the Boomers themselves only have two.  This project uses the Health and Retirement Study to assess how the number of children a person has affects the demand for formal long-term […]

When discussing universal health insurance coverage in the United States, policymakers often draw a contrast between the U.S. and high-income nations that have achieved universal coverage. Some will refer to these countries having “single payer” systems, often implying they are all alike. Yet such a label can be misleading, as considerable differences exist among universal […]