Challenges in collecting comprehensive health surveillance data on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are numerous. A number of important issues and strategies are discussed in the articles contained in this special issue of "Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities." In this article, we focus on the…

Background: School health services improve health and academic outcomes; however, sustainable funding for these services is an ongoing struggle. In December 2014, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services clarified how Medicaid will reimburse school health services. School districts, once restricted to reimbursement for services delivered…

Purpose: Medicare Part D provided 3.4 million American seniors with prescription drug insurance. It may also have had an unintended effect on pharmacy viability. This study compares trends in the number of pharmacies and rate of pharmacy closures before and after the implementation of Medicare Part D. Methods: This retrospective observational…

The Medicare prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D) is the biggest change to Medicare in decades. Knowledge of the plan among social work undergraduate students and older adults in the community was assessed. Sequential cohorts of students completed a short questionnaire assessing knowledge about Medicare Part D. Among social work students,…

Health care has been an ongoing issue of public concern for decades, well before President Obama took office. Passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, in March 2010 and upheld by a Supreme Court in June 2012. With Republicans now in control of both the House and Senate as well as the presidency, the ACA in its current…

Awareness that educational equity and health care equity are intrinsically linked is becoming more commonplace, but because a significant share of states are providing much less school funding than they were a decade ago, there are fewer local education dollars allocated to addressing the health care issues of children in school. In December 2018,…

This article investigates general physician service use by a national sample of non-Hispanic white and Hispanic Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and older. Using the health behavior model as the conceptual framework, Oaxaca decomposition multivariate analyses were conducted to examine predictors for contact with a physician and the number of…

Professional psychology's ability to meet older Americans' psychological needs and to simultaneously thrive as a profession will be closely tied to the federal Medicare program over the coming decades. Despite legislative changes in the 1980s providing professional autonomy to psychologists and expanding coverage for mental health services,…

Purpose: Medicare Cost Reports (MCR), Internal Revenue Service Form 990s (IRS 990), and Audited Financial Statements (AFS) vary in their content, detail, purpose, timeliness, and certification. The purpose of this study was to compare selected financial data elements and characterize the extent of differences in financial data and ratios across…

Context: The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) created prescription drug coverage for Medicare beneficiaries through a new Part D program, the single largest addition to Medicare since its creation in 1965. Prior to program implementation in January 2006, concerns had been voiced as to how independent…

Context: The Balanced Budget Act (BBA) of 1997 and other recent policies have led to reduced Medicare funding for home health agencies (HHAs) and visits per beneficiary. Purpose: We examine the staffing characteristics of stable Medicare-certified HHAs across rural and urban counties from 1996 to 2002, a period encompassing the changes associated…

Context: In 1997, the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Grant Program created the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) Program as a response to the financial distress of rural hospitals. It was believed that this program would reduce the rate of rural hospital closures and improve access to health care services in rural communities. Objective: The…

Dropping out of high school is related to a number of negative outcomes. For example, the median income of persons ages 18 through 67 who had not completed high school was roughly $26,000 in 2013. By comparison, the median income of persons ages 18 through 67 who completed their education with at least a high school credential (i.e., a regular…

This issue of the American Psychologist (April 2007) includes two reviews of the literature on the effects of behavioral programs to reduce body weight. One review (T. Mann et al., 2007) concentrates on dietary interventions and finds little evidence that diets are of benefit. The second review (L. H. Powell, J. E. Calvin III, & J. E. Calvin Jr.,…

The prevalence of obesity and its associated health problems have increased sharply in the past 2 decades. New revisions to Medicare policy will allow funding for obesity treatments of proven efficacy. The authors review studies of the long-term outcomes of calorie-restricting diets to assess whether dieting is an effective treatment for obesity.…