Health Affairs

The January 2010 edition of Health Affairs focuses on long-term services and supports and the challenges of ensuring affordable, high-quality care to people with disabilities, including many of the nation’s aged. The journal has invited key lawmakers and leading experts in aging and health policy to discuss the policies and new approaches needed to address [...]

On the morning of Christmas Eve, the Senate voted 60-39 along partisan lines to pass the Senate health reform bill. Now legislators can head home for the recess break. However, the hard work of reconciliation between House and Senate versions of health reform bills remains. At Health Affairs Blog, we’ve invited analysts, economists, political scientists [...]

With the passage of health legislation in both the Senate and House, the presumption now is that reform will happen.  Still, let’s not forget that there is the daunting task of reconciling several significantly different provisions –for example,  on financing, a public plan, or abortion – while maintaining 60 votes in the Senate.  But for [...]

We offer a practical solution to the issues that Jack Wennberg and Shannon Brownlee raised in their November 17th blog, “The Battle Over Rewarding Efficient Providers.”  We combine our experience in areas of law and patient care, respectively. American health care is in real peril of being swamped by surging costs.  President Barack Obama’s budget [...]

Atul Gawande, MD, is one of the best medical writers of our time. I subscribed to the New Yorker just so I could read him.  I reached eagerly for my Dec. 14, 2009 New Yorker when I heard he had an article there. I was deeply disappointed. What worries me is that his article will [...]

Editor’s Note: This is the second of two posts by Tim Jost analyzing the Senate health reform bill, as revised by the manager’s amendment offered on December 19. Jost’s first post focused on the health insurance reforms in the revised bill. One of the most common complaints about the health reform legislation pending in Congress [...]

Editor’s Note: This is the first of two posts by Tim Jost analyzing the Senate health reform bill, as revised by the manager’s amendment offered on December 19. Jost’s second post focuses on efforts to control cost and many other aspects of the revised bill. The 384-page Senate Manager’s Amendment to the upper chamber’s health reform [...]

Editor’s Note: In October, Health Affairs published two papers on factors driving imaging utilization. One paper, by Jacqueline Baras and Laurence Baker, analyzes the relationship between MRI supply and care for fee-for-service Medicare patients with low back pain. It finds that increases in MRI supply are related to higher use of both low back MRI and surgery. [...]

One of the more interesting recent health policy events took place at the Brookings Institution’s Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform. The December 2nd event did not focus on the reform bills in the House and Senate or the horse trading and sausage making that has gone into them.  The panels and discussion, titled “Using Data to [...]

Editor’s Note: In addition to S. Ward Casscells, M.D. and Hiliary Critchley (photos and bios above), contributors to this post include Larry Kaiser, M.D of the University of Texas, John Zogby of Zogby International, Inc.; Grace Ren of Zogby International; and Stephanie Greer of the University of Texas. On November 7, 2009, the U.S. House of [...]

Julie Ferguson at the Workers’ Comp Insider hosts the year’s last edition of the Health Wonk Review. Julie has done a great job of collecting the best in recent health policy blogging, include Tim J0st’s series of posts on the Senate health reform bill that appeared on the Health Affairs Blog. Happy holidays!

Editor’s Note: In the post below, Jonathan Skinner and Shannon Brownlee examine the relationship between health care spending and utilization in hospitals, on the one hand, and patient outcomes on the other. In an earlier post, John Wennberg and Brownlee rebutted claims that spending and utilization variations among academic medical centers are due to differences in patient income, race, [...]

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office weighed in on the biggest economic imponderable in the health care debate:  how private health insurance premiums will behave under health reform. Building on its December 2008 CBO health insurance market analysis,  CBO forecast largely benign effects from health reform’s private market reforms and subsidies on the vast majority [...]

Whether to include a new public health insurance option as part of health reform legislation has bedeviled Senate leaders trying to hold on to the 60 votes needed to ultimately pass a bill. The idea of allowing some individuals to voluntarily buy into Medicare before age 65 has emerged as a possible component of a compromise in [...]

Editor’s Note: Below is the transcript of a recent interview of Thomas Russell, who is stepping down on January 1 after ten years as executive director of the American College of Surgeons, by John Iglehart, Founding Editor of Health Affairs. In a wide-ranging and provocative interview, Russell endorses the creation of an independent Medicare commission to better allocate health care resources [...]

I became a mother obsessed.       It started in June, just days before my daughters, ages 12 and 10, were due to leave for summer camp. It waned a bit upon their return home, but returned full force with the start of the school year. My name is Rita, and I was obsessed with H1N1. I [...]

Editor’s Note: For more on the controversy over taxing high-cost health plans, see a “Cadillacs Or Ambulances? The Senate Tax On ‘Excessive Benefits, a Health Affairs Blog post by Joseph White and Timothy Jost published today. The Senate Democratic health plan includes a provision, backed by the Obama administration, that would tax some “Cadillac” health plans to pay [...]

Editor’s Note: For more on the controversy over taxing high-cost health plans, see “Taxing Cadillac Health Plans May Produce Chevy Results,” a Health Affairs Web First article by Jon Gabel and coauthors published today. The Senate “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” draft legislation includes a steep excise tax on high-cost, so-called Cadillac insurance plans.  [...]

Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine released To Err Is Human, a much-discussed report that launched the modern patient-safety movement.  Evaluating what has been accomplished in a Health Affairs Web First article published yesterday, Robert Wachter, author of two books on patient safety and editor of the federal government’s two leading safety Web sites, gives [...]

At a Health Affairs reporters breakfast this morning, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag defended the ability of the health reform bill being debated in the Senate to “bend the cost curve” of health care costs. “The bill that is currently on the Senate floor contains more cost-containment and delivery system [...]