These factsheets highlight how seniors and people disabilities in each state would be better able to achieve oral health, overall health, and reduced health care costs and the cost benefits of including oral health coverage in Medicare.  Like a key to open a locked door, adding oral health coverage to Medicare would help nearly 60 million seniors and people with disabilities in this country achieve oral health.

Drug companies consistently set high prices, which forces families to make impossible choices between their health care and other basic needs. Drug companies set exorbitant prices by design to maximize their profits, while making misleading claims that high prices simply fund innovative new drugs. Despite this gaming, our political system makes it easy for drug companies to continue exploitative pricing. This piece explains how our current drug pricing system leads to unaffordable prescription drugs, and ultimately harms people’s health.

Kansas lawmakers are currently considering legislation that could expand Medicaid to 150,000 nonelderly, low-income Kansans. As lawmakers debate Medicaid expansion in the state’s legislature, Families USA has published a fact sheet on the impact of Medicaid Expansion on Kansas’s state budget. Click here to view the fact sheet.

Broad bipartisan majorities in the Maryland Senate and House, by margins of 46-0 and 119-12, have approved legislation to establish a simple and seamless system for obtaining health coverage. Under the bill, an uninsured Marylander can start the enrollment process by simply checking a box on their state income tax return. That single step will let the state’s health care exchange determine eligibility for free or low-cost health insurance, based on information in the tax return. Those who qualify for Medicaid will be enrolled automatically.