Saving the Health Care Safety Net: Progress and Opportunities

Abstract

The health care safety net provides essential clinical care and social services for low-income, uninsured, and underinsured populations in the United States. Despite these important functions, the health care safety net has experienced recurrent financial instability, growing market pressures, and workforce strain. Payment reform has also introduced unique challenges for safety net providers related to measuring and reaching quality benchmarks. A common theme among these challenges is that many of them result from applying standard health policy approaches to the safety net instead of using safety net-specific approaches. This review describes progress toward strengthening the safety net, key challenges, and opportunities moving forward.

Keywords: Medicaid; Medicare; low-income; safety net; underinsured; uninsured.