The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia launched new data on the Anchor Economy Dashboard. You can now explore anchor institution economic impacts and reliance measures for the years 2004 and 2019 for all 524 U.S. regions.

In the coming weeks, they are releasing an accompanying research brief that delves deeper into the change in anchor institution reliance in the United States between 2004 and 2019. The brief will be posted to  their website and discussed at the upcoming 2024 Anchor Economy Conference in Philadelphia on May 15–16.

If you have any questions on the dashboard or this new data set, please feel free to get in touch Deborah Diamond at deborah.diamond@phil.frb.org.

The 2018 CHRONIC Care Act influenced the growth rate in MA plan enrollment by allowing plans to offer more options extending the types of benefits available to MA beneficiaries. The Act gave MA plans the flexibility to offer new supplemental benefits to address enrollees’ broader health and social needs. Now, in addition to traditional primarily health-related benefits, MA plans can offer expanded health-related benefits (e.g., in-home support services, therapeutic massage, caregiver support, home-based palliative care, and adult day health services) and special supplemental benefits for the chronically ill (SSBCI) such as food and produce, meals, transportation, and pest control.

MA plans providing any supplemental benefit were less commonly offered in noncore counties (87.2 percent of plans), followed by micropolitan counties (94.6 percent) and metropolitan counties (97.6 percent) in 2022. But only 10 to 20 percent of plans offered expanded supplemental benefits or SSBCI across all three geographies. Plans with traditional primarily health-related supplemental benefits most frequently included vision (97.6 percent), hearing (95.2 percent), fitness (94.6 percent), and dental services (93.6 percent). Significantly fewer plans offered expanded supplemental benefits and SSBCI that address beneficiaries’ broader health and social needs. Declining availability of all supplemental benefit types was seen as geography shifted from metropolitan to noncore counties.

Read the full report here.

Authors:  Edmer Lazaro, DPT, MSHCA; Dan M. Shane, PhD; Fred Ullrich, BA; Keith Mueller, PhD

The COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) led to a dramatic increase in telehealth use owing to relaxed policies to facilitate healthcare access, but early studies demonstrated variability in telehealth utilization patterns across demographic groups. COVID-19 disproportionately affected communities of color and the socially disadvantaged, highlighting existing disparities in access and quality of care in the U.S. health system.  In early 2023, an RTRC research team conducted a systematic review to summarize available evidence from early in the COVID-19 pandemic and concluded that most available evidence showed that telehealth did not reduce disparities in access to health care during the PHE. In December 2023, the prior systematic review was updated with contemporary data using the same search strategy and methods.

Of the 523 references in our updated search, 32 met final inclusion criteria for the study. Most studies were retrospective cohort studies using before-after methodology, and telehealth utilization was the most common study outcome. Compared to the initial search, more of the papers included in this search focused on total health care utilization (instead of telehealth-only utilization), but overall, conclusions were similar. Telehealth utilization, in aggregate, increased more slowly among disadvantaged groups, such as older, more rural, Black, and economically disadvantaged populations than in less disadvantaged populations over the course of the PHE.

Please click here to read the brief.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of Minority Health (CMS OMH) released the tenth edition of the Disparities in Health Care in Medicare Advantage by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex Report. This 2024 report provides a summary of the quality of health care received by people enrolled in Medicare Advantage across the United States, focusing on differences in patient experience and clinical care quality based on race, ethnicity, and sex in 2023.

Click here to review the report.

The 2024 report highlights a range of aspects regarding the quality of patient care. It includes seven measures of patient experience from the Medicare Advantage and Prescription Drug Plan Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Provider and Systems survey, along with 41 clinical care quality measures covering nine domains of care from the Health Effectiveness Data and Information Set. These measures were stratified by race and ethnicity, sex, and the combination of race and ethnicity within sex to highlight areas where disparities exist.

For more information and to explore other recent reports, research efforts, and data, please visit our Research & Data webpage.

A new study released in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) shows the gap in preventable premature mortality (or early death) between rural and urban America is growing wider. People living in rural areas are at a higher risk of dying early from one of the five leading causes of death when the death could have been prevented compared to people living in urban areas.  A video on premature and preventable deaths is available here.

This report is an extension of the 2019 CDC study, which showed the percentage of preventable early deaths from the five leading causes was higher in rural counties compared with urban counties during 2010–2017. It extends the study period by including mortality data for additional years (2018-2022), expanding the analysis from 2010 to 2022. Below are some of the main findings, and a brief data visualization of the report is available here.

Cancer 

• The percentage of preventable early cancer deaths among all premature deaths declined from 21% in 2010 to 0.3% in 2022. Regardless of metropolitan status, all county categories experienced declines.
• However, declines in urban areas were larger than those in rural areas, which widened the rural-urban disparities in early cancer deaths.
• Differences in tobacco use and less access to lung cancer screening facilities may explain some of this gap.

Unintentional injury

• The percentage of preventable early deaths from unintentional injury increased from 2010 through 2019 (39% to 54%), followed by a steep increase from 2019 to 2021 and a slight decrease through June 2022 to 64%.
• Increases in the percentage of preventable early deaths from unintentional injury during 2010-2022 were statistically significant for all rural-urban county categories except micropolitan (rural counties with small towns, population of 10,000 to 50,000 person).
• Percentages were higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the gap narrowed.
• The worsening and expanding drug overdose epidemic, increases in motor vehicle traffic fatalities, and increases in falls drive the growth in early deaths from unintentional injury.

Stroke

• The percentage of preventable early deaths from stroke declined slightly from 2010 through 2019 (32% to 26%), followed by an increase to 34% through June 2022.
• Each rural-urban county category experienced steep increases from 2019 to June 2022, except for the most rural counties, which experienced a slight decrease from 2021 to June 2022; rural counties had the highest percentage from January to June 2022 (42% in micropolitan counties and 41% in noncore counties).
• Increases in 2020 and 2021 were likely associated with COVID-19-related conditions that contributed to risk-associated increased heart disease and stroke mortality, such as delayed or avoided emergency care treatment.
• The highest percentages of preventable early deaths from stroke in 2022 were in southern states.

These findings can help guide local public health interventions to reduce risks of early death, while also highlighting the need to understand and address underlying social, environmental, and structural inequities contributing to disparities in preventable early deaths between rural and urban areas.

Access the full report and share this information with your network using our partner toolkit. This resource contains social media messages, graphics, and newsletter text you can use to help bring awareness of these findings and the need for more multi-sector approaches and focused interventions across the U.S. to reduce early death from the five leading causes. View CDC’s rural health website and  Rural Public Health At-a-Glance to find out what CDC is doing to improve the health and well-being of rural communities.

For as long as statistics about opioid overdose deaths have been collected in the United States, white individuals have been much more likely to die than Black individuals of the same age. With the rapidly increasing rate of fentanyl overdoses in the late 2010s, that trend began to reverse — by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, more Black Americans began to die of opioid overdoses and from drug overdoses of any kind, according to researchers at Penn State.

New research from the Penn State College of Health and Human Development examined racial and regional differences in overdose fatalities from 2012-21, capturing the periods preceding and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In most of the nation, the researchers found that younger Black individuals died of overdose at lower rates than their white counterparts, but older Black individuals — especially men in Midwestern cities — became several times more likely to die of drug overdose than their white counterparts as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged.

The study was published in The American Journal on Addictions.

Read more.