The Affordable Care Act includes several provisions that are expected to significantly improve women's health. The Affordable Care Act improves coverage for important preventive services and maternity care, promotes higher quality care for older women, and ends the gender discrimination that requires women to pay more for the same insurance coverage as men. Over one million young adult women have already gained health insurance coverage because of the Affordable Care Act and 13 million more women will gain coverage by 2016. [7 PDF pages]

This report presents information on current uses of burden of illness (BOI) measures, trends in BOI measurement, and the methodological and data challenges that affect BOI measurement and reporting. Three main activities were undertaken: a literature review, an environmental scan, and a roundtable meeting with experts. The literature review summarizes key BOI measures and measurement approaches and challenges for implementing each measure. The environmental scan consisted of expert interviews and a survey of public and private websites and databases. During the Roundtable, fifteen government and nongovernment policy and BOI experts discussed key challenges for BOI measurement, areas of consensus, and areas needing further consideration. [47 PDF pages]

This paper examines the limited evidence to date on the impact of disease management (DM) for low-income populations enrolled in public insurance programs, and explores issues concerning the effectiveness of DM targeted to people living with HIV/AIDS. [22 PDF pages]

Many federal agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), maintain major HIV-related databases. The databases maintained or sponsored by these agencies contain a range of potentially useful information, including epidemiologic and patient-level clinical data as well as health resource utilization, disability benefits, and insurance claims information. Despite the potential utility of these databases to address multi-agency policy issues, there is no single inventory that fully describes their study design, data collection methodology, and common and unique data elements. As a result, both policy makers and researchers may not be fully aware of the breadth of data available to support their policy making, administrative, program evaluation, and research needs. This report addresses that gap.

Approximately 800 HIV-infected children nationally were in foster care placement as of June 1989. This study was designed to define the specific problems related to providing foster care to children with HIV infection. A major element of the project was to conduct site visits to areas with a high incidence of AIDS in children and to learn how organizations have grappled with the issues of providing foster care for HIV-infected children. [65 PDF pages]