In recent years, community health centers (CHCs) have struggled to meet the needs of underserved communities because of limited resources and growing demand. Medicaid and Medicare use prospective paym...

Community health centers (CHCs) are a critical and growing part of the health care safety net, doubling over the past 15 years to expand access to essential health care services to over 31 million pat...

Rural Americans face significant barriers to accessing adequate primary care; tailored federal and state programs can help address some of these challenges.

Decades of research confirms the safety, quality, and effectiveness of care provided by NPs, including care for complex patients, and their acceptance and approval by patients. Yet challenges remain i...

Obstetricians and gynecologists (OB-GYNs) provide essential health care to women across their lifespan. Yet nearly half of US counties have no OB-GYNs, with nonmetropolitan communities disproportionately affected. Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws, spurred by the 1992 US Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, impose regulatory burdens on abortion providers and may have influenced whether and where OB-GYNs choose to practice, which has not yet been comprehensively studied. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design and county-level data, we found that TRAP laws were associated with an average reduction of 4.67 percent in the density of OB-GYNs per 100,000 women ages 15–44 during the period 1993–2021, between Casey and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022. TRAP laws affected both general and fellowship-trained OB-GYNs, as well as counties without abortion facilities. Concerningly, TRAP laws led to lower physician density in nonmetropolitan counties—a difference that persisted for a decade. As OB-GYN shortages are projected to worsen and TRAP laws are still in effect in twenty-four states, policy makers should consider the long-run effects of TRAP laws on women’s access to health care and their potential to exacerbate geographic disparities in access to care.

Amid major public health challenges, community health centers continue to provide millions of patients with accessible, comprehensive, and coordinated health care.

Policy Points Community health centers (CHCs) are mandated to simultaneously maintain collaborative relationships with all other health care providers in their service area while consistently exp...

This cohort study examines whether Medicaid alternative payment models are associated with the health care quality, health outcome measures, payer mix,

Nonprofit hospitals are behaving in ways that seem to focus more on dollars than patients.