Reports for Coverage and Care

Texas v. United States, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, seeks to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The court’s decision in the case could be announced any day and the case may ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. A final ruling that overturns the ACA would have widespread implications, affecting every state in the nation.

This brief and accompanying set of tables serve as an update to previously released reports on the geography of uninsurance in Massachusetts. Relying on newly released data for 2013-2017 from the American Community Survey (ACS), this brief uses three measures of uninsurance – uninsurance rate, number of uninsured, and concentration of uninsured – to identify high-uninsurance communities in the state.

This collection of materials is the latest in a series by the Urban Institute summarizing the findings from the 2018 Massachusetts Health Reform Survey (MHRS). The Foundation began conducting the MHRS in fall 2006 to support the evaluation of Massachusetts’ 2006 health care reform bill. The survey has been fielded periodically since 2006 – most recently in spring 2018 – to monitor key measures pertaining to health insurance coverage and health care access and affordability among non-elderly adults (ages 19-64) in Massachusetts.

This brief frames the key issues and potential impacts to Massachusetts consumers that may result from implementation of the federal proposed rule to expand the availability of Association Health Plans (AHPs). This brief:

This brief provides an overview of the steps that Massachusetts has taken to establish a functioning insurance market that provides consumers with meaningful access to health coverage. It includes a review of statutory and regulatory provisions in place today, and provides context for key health reform initiatives that have occurred over the past 30+ years. This brief is structured around four key components of a functioning market for health coverage:

The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, on behalf of the Massachusetts Coalition for Coverage and Care, funded a state-level analysis on the impact of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) on Massachusetts focused on 2022, when the law would be fully phased in.

Massachusetts currently has the lowest uninsurance rate in the nation, and as part of the individual mandate to carry health insurance coverage, the state collects detailed information through its tax filing process about the health insurance status of over four million residents. This report analyzes 2011 and 2012 state tax filer data and provides new information about Massachusetts residents that are prone to remaining uninsured over consecutive years.

This report includes findings from the evaluation of the 2013-2015 Connecting Consumers with Care grant program. The goals of the evaluation were to 1) assess progress made on select outreach and enrollment measures, 2) describe the practices grantees adopted to reach and enroll consumers in health insurance, and 3) characterize efforts and challenges in defining, promoting, and evaluating consumer self-sufficiency.

Chapter 58 of the Acts of 2006—“An Act Providing Access To Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care”—was signed into law by Governor Mitt Romney on April 12, 2006. The groundbreaking law sought near-universal health care coverage for the residents of Massachusetts by expanding Medicaid, creating a new program of subsidized insurance, enacting changes to the health insurance market, and requiring adults to have health insurance unless an affordable option was not available.