October 12, 2009. SHARE grantees are currently in the process of releasing preliminary findings from their evaluations of state-level reform strategies. As these findings are released, SHARE will be publishing a series of issue briefs, highlighting successful state reform strategies with the goal of informing the current health care debate. SHARE today introduces the first brief in this series. The brief, titled "State of Reform," provides an overview and synthesis of recent grantee findings and significant lessons learned. Specifically, the brief highlights several lessons learned about reforms involving public programs:
- Simplifying the enrollment process for public programs promotes increases in enrollment for the currently eligible.
- Keeping public programs affordable encourages enrollment.
- Expanding public program eligibility doesn't necessarily lead to a drop in employer-sponsored coverage (i.e., crowd-out).
- A significant administrative burden for employers in three-share programs can deter their participation.
States are sometimes called "laboratories for reform," as they can explore reform strategies on a smaller scale, function as experiments, and, ideally, inform future state and national efforts. Today's brief and the briefs that follow are meant to serve as "lab reports" to ensure that the lessons learned from state experiences are broadly and effectively disseminated to researchers and policy-makers as they consider reform on a larger scale.
To view the "State of Reform" issue brief, click here.
To read a related blog post from SHARE Director Lynn Blewett, click here.