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As of January 1, 2014, the Affordable Care Act designated mental health and substance use services as an essential health benefit in Marketplace plans and extended parity protections to the individual and small-group markets. We analyzed documents for seventy-eight individual and small-group plans in 2014 (after parity provisions took effect) and sixty comparison plans in 2013 (the year before parity provisions took effect) to understand the degree to which coverage for mental health and substance use care improved relative to medical/surgical benefits. The results suggest that plan issuers did what the provisions required them to do. Although in 2013 a lower proportion of plans covered mental health or substance use care, compared to medical/surgical care, in 2014 the proportions were the same. If essential health benefit requirements were to be removed and mental health and substance use coverage becomes similar to that in 2013, as many as 20 percent of the plans in our sample would not cover these conditions. To determine whether increases in behavioral health coverage will result in improved access to behavioral health services requires complementary data on the size of provider networks and use of services.

Medicaid expansion in Arizona has helped the Indian Health Service and tribally run health systems improve access., (Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.)

Patients with behavioral health disorders often have worse health outcomes and have higher health care utilization than patients with medical diseases alone. As such, people with behavioral health conditions are important populations for accountable care organizations (ACOs) seeking to improve the efficiency of their delivery systems. However, ACOs have historically faced numerous barriers in implementing behavioral health population-based programs, including acquiring reimbursement, recruiting providers, and integrating new services. We developed an evidence-based, all-payer collaborative care program called Behavioral Health Associates (BHA), operated as part of UCLA Health, an integrated academic medical center. Building BHA required several innovations, which included using our enterprise electronic medical record for behavioral health referrals and documentation; registering BHA providers with insurance plans' mental health carve-out products; and embedding BHA providers in primary care practices throughout the UCLA Health system. Since 2012 BHA has more than tripled the number of patients receiving behavioral health services through UCLA Health. After receiving BHA treatment, patients had a 13 percent reduction in emergency department use. Our efforts can serve as a model for other ACOs seeking to integrate behavioral health care into routine practice., (Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.)

Two commonly used metrics for assessing progress toward universal health coverage involve assessing citizens' rights to health care and counting the number of people who are in a financial protection scheme that safeguards them from high health care payments. On these metrics most countries in Latin America have already "reached" universal health coverage. Neither metric indicates, however, whether a country has achieved universal health coverage in the now commonly accepted sense of the term: that everyone--irrespective of their ability to pay--gets the health services they need without suffering undue financial hardship. We operationalized a framework proposed by the World Bank and the World Health Organization to monitor progress under this definition and then constructed an overall index of universal health coverage achievement. We applied the approach using data from 112 household surveys from 1990 to 2013 for all twenty Latin American countries. No country has achieved a perfect universal health coverage score, but some countries (including those with more integrated health systems) fare better than others. All countries except one improved in overall universal health coverage over the time period analyzed., (Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.)

Since the inception of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Program in 1997, over 1,300 rural hospitals have converted to critical-access hospitals, which entitles them to Medicare cost-based reimbursement instead of reimbursement based on the hospital prospective payment system (PPS). Several changes to eligibility for critical-access status have recently been proposed. Most of the changes focus on mandating that hospitals be located a certain minimum distance from the nearest hospital. Our study found that critical-access hospitals located within fifteen miles of another hospital generally are larger, provide better quality, and are financially stronger compared to critical-access hospitals located farther from another hospital. Returning to the PPS would have considerable negative impacts on critical-access hospitals that are located near another hospital. We conclude that establishing a minimum-distance requirement would generate modest cost savings for Medicare but would likely be disruptive to the communities that depend on these hospitals for their health care., (Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc.)

Alzheimers disease and other dementias are chronic, incurable diseases that require coordinated care that addresses the medical, behavioral, and social aspects of the disease. With funding from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, we launched a dementia care program in which a nurse practitioner acting as a dementia care manager worked with primary care physicians to develop and implement a dementia care plan that offers training and support to caregivers, manages care transitions, and facilitates access to community-based services. Postvisit surveys showed high levels of caregiver satisfaction. As program enrollment grows, outcomes will be tracked based on the Triple Aim developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and adopted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: better care, better health, and lower cost and utilization. The program, if successful at achieving the Triple Aim, may serve as a national model for how dementia and other chronic diseases can be managed in partnership with primary care practices. It may also inform policy and reimbursement decisions for the recently released transitional care management codes and the complex chronic care management codes to be released by Medicare in 2015.