The State Reports database contains hundreds of reports relating to health care coverage that have been produced by the states themselves, or have been written about state programs. This database is supported by powerful search capabilities to help you find reports on topics that are of interest to you.

There are several ways to search the database:

(1) search by state

All States - To view all of the reports entered in the database, select All States from the pull-down menu and press Submit.

Particular States - To view reports produced by a particular state, or written about a particular state's programs, select that state from the pull-down menu and press Submit.

(2) search by keyword

The keyword search function allows you to conduct a full-text search of every report in the database. This is a powerful tool that allows you to quickly find information on a broad range of topics.

Guidance for using the keyword search function:

Exact Phrase - If you enter multiple keywords (e.g., Healthy New York), the search engine will select reports in which those words appear consecutively. (Some search engines require that you use quotation marks around the phrase, but that is not necessary here.)

And - To find documents where two or more keywords appear somewhere within the document (but not necessarily in sequence), use the 'and' function (e.g., enrollment and SCHIP).

Or - To find documents where either one keyword or another appears somewhere within the document, use the 'or' function (e.g., insurer or plan).

Multiple Word Endings - If your search term contains many possible endings (e.g., insure, insured, insurer, insurance) and you would like the search to capture all of these, use an asterisk at the end of the search term (e.g., insur*).

Hyphenations - The search engine generally ignores hyphenations. For example, searching for cost-sharing and cost sharing will result in the same number of hits. However, avoid using hyphenations when using the asterisk function mentioned above (e.g., risk-adjus*), because that will interfere with the search function.

Case Sensitivity - In general, the search engine is not case sensitive. For example, a search for HIFA and hifa will yield the same results. However, when there is mixed casing within a single search term (e.g., hiFa, or MinnesotaCare, or Subsidies), the search engine will return only the documents that contain the exact casing match. Therefore, we recommend that you use all lower case or all upper case letters when entering keywords.

(3) search by state and keyword

The State Reports search engine also allows you to combine the two types of searches described above. For example, you can select Michigan from the pull-down menu and then enter Medicaid as the keyword. This will bring up all the reports written by (or about) Michigan that also contain the keyword Medicaid.

Note that the default selection for the Search by State category is All States. When All States is selected and a keyword is entered, the search results will contain results from the documents of any state where that keyword appears.

Note also that you may enter a state name as a keyword even while selecting All States. For example, entering the keyword Michigan will bring up not only the reports produced by Michigan, but also reports produced by other states that contain the word Michigan in the document.

the search results

If you perform an All States search and with no keyword, the search results will be organized in alphabetical order by state with the most recent reports from each state appearing first.

If you select a particular state from the pull-down menu and do not enter a keyword, the search results will be organized by date, with the most recent appearing first.

Results from a keyword search are ranked by relevancy. In general, the reports in which the search term(s) appear(s) most often will appear at the top of the list of results.

State Reports also allows you to sort the list of results by state or by date. This allows you to find what you're looking for more quickly.