Health Affairs

WHAT:      More than 1,000 health care leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, government officials and others will join the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Health Affairs, the West Wireless Health Institute and keynote speaker Dr. Atul Gawande, at the Care Innovations Summit. WHO:       Marilyn Tavenner, Acting Administrator, [...]

Editor’s Note: The January 2012 issue of Health Affairs is a thematic volume titled “Confronting The Growing Diabetes Crisis.” Ariella was a different child, thin and shy, when I first met her about a year and a half ago, just after her 6th birthday. Her mother had noted her thirst and hunger, and, despite this [...]

On November 8, 2011, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) solicited the public for feedback on Medicare’s controversial coverage with evidence development (CED) policy. Although CMS did not finalize the CED policy until 2006, the agency first applied the CED concept in 1995 through a national coverage determination (NCD) on lung volume reduction [...]

Editor’s note: Below, we offer “Defensive Medicine,” the first health policy poetry to appear on Health Affairs Blog. The author is Adam Possner, a general internist and an assistant professor at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, whose poetry has been featured in the Journal of the American Medical Association and [...]

Health Affairs is pleased to be a media partner for the World Congress 7th Annual World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress (WHIT) on November 7-8 in Vienna, Virginia. Annually, WHIT gathers hundreds CIOs, CTOs, CIOs, CMIOs and other senior level IT executives to discuss how health care can further be improved with the use and the implementation of [...]

In the battle over bending the cost curve in Medicare, a recent article in Health Affairs should set off alarms.  In it, Francis Lukas and colleagues describe the proliferation of new cardiac surgery programs—300 in 10 years–at exactly the same time that the number of cardiac bypass grafts fell.  Moreover, the new programs generally did [...]

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria has saved millions of lives, but now it is in crisis.  A string of revelations about the misuse of its grants to governments in developing countries, culminating in the recent news of the theft of $2.5 million worth of malaria drugs, has led some backers of [...]

The rising availability through the Internet of commonly abused prescription drugs has raised public health concerns.  A new study released today as a Web First article by Health Affairs shows that a 10 percent increase in the availability of high-speed Internet service in a state was associated with an approximately 1 percent increase in admissions [...]

Health Affairs today adds a new Medical Education recording to its free collection of Narrative Matters essays on iTunes U. The account was written by Fitzhugh Mullan, a physician and clinical professor of pediatrics and public health at the George Washington University and the original editor of the “Narrative Matters” section. The essay, “Me And [...]

Some debates about health care policy represent black and white choices. But others are a more nuanced shade of grey: the new proposals could turn out well, or not so well, depending on how they are implemented. One such reform getting broad-based attention is the creation of Medicare Accountable Care Organizations, or “ACOs,” which are [...]

Editor’s Note: The authors of the post below, Dan Mendelson and Tanisha Carino, also wrote an earlier post on the initial decision of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to undertake a national coverage review of the cancer drug Provenge. In one of its most anticipated national coverage decisions (NCD), issued on March 30, [...]

The challenge of reining in the rising costs of the Medicare Program is particularly thorny because it confronts a recalcitrant societal tension between the necessity for cost control and the value of open-ended technology use for life extension in the later years. That tension is becoming more deeply entrenched because a growing number of older [...]

The 8th Annual World Health Care Congress (WHCC) will convene April 4-6, 2011 in Washington D.C. with more than 1,800 health care leaders to address the challenges of health care cost, quality and delivery. Health Affairs is a supporting publication for this event, which presents leading-edge case studies and best practices from all industry sectors, [...]

In his State of the Union address, President Obama raised the political stakes for innovative American industries by calling for concerted, bipartisan action to enhance U.S. competitiveness through heightened innovation.  Signaling that “this is our generation’s Sputnik moment” that requires “a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space [...]

Editor’s Note: In the October issue of Health Affairs, Steven Pearson and Peter Bach proposed a new Medicare payment model incorporating comparative effectiveness research. Under the model, services offering greater health benefits than an existing alternative would receive cost-based reimbursement, but services offering benefits only comparable to an existing alternative would receive a “reference price” equal to [...]

Editor’s Note: In the October issue of Health Affairs, Steven Pearson and Peter Bach proposed a new Medicare payment model incorporating comparative effectiveness research. Under the model, services offering greater health benefits than an existing alternative would receive cost-based reimbursement, but services offering benefits only comparable to an existing alternative would receive a “reference price” equal to [...]

Editor’s Note: In the October issue of Health Affairs, Steven Pearson and Peter Bach proposed a new Medicare payment model incorporating comparative effectiveness research. Under the model, services offering greater health benefits than an existing alternative would receive cost-based reimbursement, but services offering benefits only comparable to an existing alternative would receive a “reference price” equal to the reimbursement [...]

In late December, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked approval of the cancer drug Avastin for metastatic breast cancer. The decision set off a firestorm of reaction: the right condemned the denial of a potential life-saving drug for breast cancer patients, while the left cheered the withdrawal of an expensive drug that seemed to offer little [...]

Editor’s Note: In the post below, Caroline Poplin takes a skeptical look at Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and the trends they represent. For more on ACOs from various perspectives, readers can consult the January issue of Health Affairs, released on Thursday, January 6, titled “Accountable Care Organizations: Making Them Work.” Physicians have doubtless been issuing jeremiads since [...]

In his recent book, NIH Director Francis Collins refers to DNA and the new science of genomics as “the language of life.”  Thanks to the mapping of the human genome, says Collins, virtually all biomedical researchers agree “that their approach to understanding how life works has been profoundly and irreversibly affected….”  This profound new knowledge, of [...]