In every community across Pennsylvania, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) play a big role in keeping kids covered and healthy.

Through these public health insurance options, nearly half of all Pennsylvania children have access to check-ups, doctor recommended screenings, vaccinations and much more.

Our annual fact sheets provide a breakdown of the more than 1.3 million Pennsylvania children enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP within each legislative district.

PPC uses these fact sheets to educate members of Pennsylvania’s Congressional delegation, state House, and state Senate about the critical role of Medicaid and CHIP in providing families with high-quality, affordable health care for both physical and mental health.

Access the fact sheets here.

According to a new report from Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, children in Pennsylvania’s small towns and rural communities depend on Medicaid just as much as children in Pennsylvania’s urban communities. And it shows that Pennsylvania adults and seniors in rural communities are insured through Medicaid at higher rates than their urban counterparts.

This is especially important given most of Pennsylvania’s counties are considered rural.  In fact, Pennsylvania ranks 5th highest in the country for the number of people living in small towns and rural areas.

Any large cuts to Medicaid that are currently being considered would pose very serious threats to residents and their health care systems in rural communities that are already struggling.

Pennsylvania relies on federal Medicaid funding to thrive. Federal cuts to Medicaid would shift the burden onto Pennsylvania’s budget and lead to higher uninsured rates among our kids, seniors, pregnant women and people with disabilities.

Read the coverage: Proposed Medicaid Cuts Threaten Rural PA Residents, Hospitals

The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) publicly released new County-Level Utilization and Condition-Specific Reports today, giving stakeholders in Pennsylvania valuable insight into ambulatory/outpatient usage and hospitalization rates of high interest conditions, using the most recent data available.

County-Level Utilization Reports are updated every quarter and show the overall total number of inpatient hospitalizations and ambulatory/outpatient cases for Pennsylvania residents. These results are displayed by patient age, sex, and payer. The newly released County-Level Utilization Reports reflect data from Q2 of 2024.

PHC4’s County-Level Condition-Specific Reports focus on several high interest conditions displaying county-specific rates of hospitalization for Pennsylvania residents. This information reflects data from the state fiscal year 2024, which is July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024. The analysis within the County-Level Condition-Specific Reports is limited to Pennsylvania general acute care hospitals.

“This succinct series of reports sheds light on critical health care components at a county-level. This type of reporting is one of many ways PHC4 proudly supports Pennsylvania communities.” said Barry D. Buckingham, PHC4’s Executive Director. Buckingham went on to say that PHC4’s goals include providing fact-based reporting in support of those charged with prioritizing health care resources effectively. The organization believes this is in direct support of the newly established mission of empowering Pennsylvanians through transparent reporting.

PHC4 is an independent council formed under Pennsylvania statute (Act 89 of 1986, as amended by Act 15 of 2020) in order to address rapidly growing health care costs. PHC4 continues to produce comparative information about the most efficient and effective health care to individual consumers and group purchasers of health services. In addition, PHC4 produces information used to identify opportunities to contain costs and improve the quality of care delivered.

For more information, visit phc4.org or review the full report here.

Media contact:

Barry D. Buckingham, Executive Director, PHC4, bbuckingham@phc4.org

Dan Shane PhD; Edmer Lazaro, DPT, MSHC; Fred Ullrich, BA; and Keith Mueller, PhD

This brief explores how the process for setting benchmark payments for Medicare Advantage plans may create different incentives across rural and urban counties.

Key Findings:

• Rural counties are less likely to rank in the lower Medicare Fee for Service (FFS) spending quartiles that receive a higher percentage of the county benchmark: 41 percent of rural counties are categorized in combined quartiles 1 and 2 versus 59 percent for urban counties.
• Global caps (maximum benchmark payments based on pre-Affordable Care Act (ACA) county FFS spending) on benchmark payments  are much more likely in rural counties, particularly those in the lower-spending quartiles, reducing incentives for supplemental benefits or reduced cost sharing.

Additional products:

• Medicare Advantage Plan Growth in Rural America: Opportunities for Beneficiaries https://www.ruralhealthresearch.org/projects/1004
• Medicare Advantage Plan Growth in Rural America: Availability of Supplemental Benefits https://rupri.public-health.uiowa.edu/publications/policybriefs/2024/MA_Plan_Growth.pdf

Contact Information:

Keith J. Mueller, PhD; keith-mueller@uiowa.edu
Director, RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis
University of Iowa College of Public Health
Office: 1.319.384.3832

The American Cancer Society has released key findings from Cancer Statistics 2025 and its consumer-friendly companion, Cancer Facts & Figures 2025. The report, published annually since 1951, is considered the gold standard for cancer surveillance information, with timely cancer findings to help improve the lives of people with cancer.

This year’s report shows the cancer mortality rate declined by 34% from 1991 to 2022 in the United States, averting approximately 4.5 million deaths.

However, this steady progress is jeopardized by increasing incidence for many cancer types, especially among women and younger adults, shifting the burden of disease. For example, incidence rates in women 50-64 years of age have surpassed those in men, and rates in women under 50 are now 82% higher than their male counterparts, up from 51% in 2002. This pattern includes lung cancer, which is now higher in women than in men among people younger than 65 years.

These important findings are published in the January 16 issue of CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, alongside Cancer Facts & Figures 2025, available on cancer.org.

See the full report at: Cancer Facts and Statistics | American Cancer Society

HealthHIV’s Fourth Annual State of Aging with HIV™ National Survey examines crucial issues affecting people aging with HIV (PAWH) and the workforce that supports them. The findings reveal four interconnected challenges: financial precarity and persistent insurance gaps that block access to essential care, declining quality of life driven by widespread mental health challenges, a shortage of aging-focused services leaving caregivers and communities unsupported, and rising frustration with the healthcare system and insufficient government protections.

The survey examines crucial issues facing long-term survivors and adults aging with HIV. For the first time, this survey has two population focuses—one that reached the PAWH community and one that reached the workforce that provides health and human services to the population. Survey data was collected between August and September 2024 and included responses from 907 participants. HealthHIV conducted the survey as part of its Pozitively Aging program, which is supported by Gilead’s HIV Age Positively Initiative.

Key findings include:

• Financial precarity and persistent insurance gaps impact the vast majority of PAWH and block access to essential care: Nearly half of respondents lack a financial plan for retirement, and the majority of those who have one are unsure if it will cover potential long-term care needs. Over three-quarters avoided or delayed seeking medical care in the last year due to concerns about insurance coverage or out-of-pocket costs.
• Continued decline in quality of life for many PAWH, largely driven by mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety: More than three-quarters (76%) of PAWH experienced moderate to high mental health stress over the last six months, and mental health diagnoses, like depression or anxiety, were the second most common comorbidity impacting PAWH.
• The gap is widening between aging services and the specific needs of PAWH, leaving them and their caregivers unsupported and without tailored resources, training or support: Most organizations recognize the need for aging-focused services, but many haven’t implemented them. Over half of providers believe that informal caregivers of older persons with HIV lack necessary support. Broader aging services are fragmented from HIV-specific programs like Ryan White, especially with transitions to Medicare.
• Increasing discontent and anger with the health care system reflects widespread community fatigue and insufficient government protections: Most PAWH (72%) feel the government isn’t adequately addressing their needs, and the vast majority of all respondents—97% of providers and 88% of community members—call for enhanced advocacy efforts for the aging HIV community.

In coordination with HealthHIV’s Pozitively Aging program, findings from this survey will be used in the creation of vital education and training materials for the HIV care workforce and will inform advocacy and research priorities for the coming year surrounding those aging with HIV.

Click here to access the full report.

While the popularity of online banking has grown, physical banking still plays an important role for many consumers. A lack of access to banking services can mean losing opportunities to improve financial health and build wealth.

Originally created by Alaina Barca and colleagues from the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia and Cleveland, the Banking Deserts Dashboard has just been updated. Those updates include the release of 2024 banking desert data, and user experience improvements like an underlying base map to better orient users to census tract locations and an overall friendlier user experience.

Check out the dashboard to identify banking deserts and potential banking deserts across the United States. Across the nation, all the way down to counties, this dashboard uses census tract data to paint a geographical picture of where deserts and potential deserts are located.

This policy brief continues RUPRI Center’s annual update of Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment including the changes in enrollment in types of MA plans, and health policy changes that may have had an impact.

Key Findings:

• Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment now exceeds 50 percent of eligible beneficiaries (enrolled in both Part A and Part B) in metropolitan counties (56.1 percent); at the current rate of growth, nonmetropolitan enrollment is expected to exceed 50 percent (currently 48.1 percent) next year, in 2025.
• While the annual rate of MA growth continues to exceed the rate of growth in total Medicare eligible beneficiaries, it has moderated somewhat from previous years.
• Much of the growth in nonmetropolitan MA enrollment has been in plans using local preferred provider organizations (PPOs), accounting for a majority of MA enrollees in nonmetropolitan counties since 2022.

Click here to read the full brief.

Additional products:

• Medicare Advantage Enrollment Updates: https://ruprihealth.org/maupdates/enrollment.html
• Medicare Advantage, National and State Enrollment Tables and Maps: https://ruprihealth.org/maupdates/nstablesmaps.html

Authors: Fred Ullrich, BA; and Keith Mueller, PhD

For more information, contact:

Keith J. Mueller, PhD; keith-mueller@uiowa.edu
Director, RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis
University of Iowa College of Public Health
Office: 1.319.384.3832

The COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) led to some of the most sweeping changes in telehealth policy, use, and research in recent history. These changes provided natural experiments that enabled research groups to study the implications of telehealth use on access to care, patient experiences, provider experiences, clinical outcomes, and cost, specifically during the PHE. Some of these studies included analyses or sub-aims focused on health equity. While other systematic reviews focusing on telehealth related to policy changes during the PHE have been conducted, most of those systematic reviews have not focused on the ways in which telehealth ameliorated health disparities.

In 2022, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Office for the Advancement of Telehealth funded a project to conduct living systematic reviews (LSRs) to describe the current evidence measuring the association between telehealth use during the COVID-19 PHE and health equity. To conduct LSRs focused on health equity, we convened an Expert Panel to select the specific questions that we would include in our formal systematic review searches. We conducted three systematic reviews, and we planned both a primary search and a secondary (“living”) follow-up search. Methods and findings are discussed in this brief.

Please click here to read the brief.

Rural Telehealth Research Center, University of Iowa, 200 Hawkins Drive, 1008 RCP, Iowa City, IA 52242
Email: rtrc-inquiry@uiowa.edu
www.ruraltelehealth.org

HRSA’s National Center for Health Workforce Analysis collects data, conducts research, and generates information to inform and support public- and private-sector decision making. This brief, State of the Primary Care Workforce, 2024, examines the supply of physicians, physician assistants (PA), and nurse practitioners (NP) practicing in primary care specialties (family medicine, general pediatric medicine, general internal medicine, and geriatric medicine).

While rural areas generally have lower primary care physician ratios than urban areas, the data show that NPs and PAs are important in providing primary care in rural areas. Approximately half of PAs were interested in practicing in rural locations (44%), Medically Underserved Areas (58%), or Health Professional Shortage Areas (54%).