Health Affairs

Over the past month, health funders have released several polls providing insights on how the public and opinion leaders are now viewing the health system, the roll out of national health reform, and the role of government in the health sector. Nine of ten leaders in health care and health care policy believe it is [...]

A posting on the Health Affairs blog earlier this year by Carol Levine asked the pointed question: “The year of the family caregiver- in what country?”  In it, she compared the “Year of the Family Caregiver” in the U.S. to the recent elections in Canada, where politicians were competing to see who could provide a [...]

Should everyone be required to have health insurance? The short answer is no. There is nothing that can be achieved with a mandate to buy health insurance that cannot be better achieved by a carefully designed system of tax subsidies. Beyond that, a requirement that everyone obtain insurance (as the new health reform law dictates) [...]

Reducing Medicare Part D drug prices requires careful tools, not simply the power to negotiate

I live in Texas. Right now, the only health insurance I can buy is insurance regulated under Texas law. But if bills before Congress (most notably, one sponsored by Arizona Republican Congressman John Shadegg), are enacted, I would be able to buy insurance regulated, say, by the laws of Virginia, or the laws of Delaware, [...]

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 [...]

As Congress and the Administration debate health care reform, it is instructive to look at the Massachusetts model, now in its third year. Health Affairs today released a study of workers in the Bay State who were interviewed in fall 2008 about their employer-sponsored health care coverage, following up on similar surveys in 2006 and [...]

One of the most controversial parts of the Obama health reform campaign platform was its pledge to create a new Medicare-like public health insurance offering that would “compete” with existing private insurance plans, and put pressure on them and on providers to hold down costs. It would do this mainly by using Medicare-like pricing leverage [...]

A public-private alliance known as the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) has greatly improved aviation safety. A similar alliance among health care stakeholders could reduce medication and device errors and wrong-site surgeries, renowned patient safety expert Peter Pronovost and coauthors say in an article published April 7 on the Health Affairs Web site. Pronovost is a [...]

The most-read posts on Health Affairs Blog this January included much health reform advice to the Obama Administration and calls to action on health IT and rebuilding primary care. Additional commenting is always welcome. Top 20 Health Affairs Journal Articles For 2008 by Jane Hiebert-White Complete The Work On Health Information Technology by David Brailer [...]

Americans need and deserve health information technology (IT). As the chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications Inc. and the only business representative on a federal commission to develop a strategy for health care IT standards, I have spent considerable time over the past several years promoting this technological necessity.   In addition, Verizon helped found an [...]

Just when it looked as if the debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) couldn’t get any more agonizing, some of the same folks who brought us the devastating RAND 55 percent study four years ago are back with the dismal news that children, on average, receive recommended treatment in only 46.5 percent [...]

Policy debates about reauthorizing and expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and its related Medicaid programs for kids are about providing access for poor kids to health insurance. School-based health care is about reaching kids where they spend half or more of each weekday. The larger issue in creating high-quality health care accessible [...]

Community rating, once the hallmark of health insurance in the United States, has been in accelerated decline since the 1980s. For the past few years, a fundamentally opposite notion of insurance, that of individual health savings accounts has been all the rage. The concept of consumer-driven health care–making consumers more aware of the actual costs [...]

Elliott Fisher and colleagues in their provocative paper published online December 5 validated an approach to quantifying the clinical and economic performance of physician communities clustered statistically around hospitals. Fisher describes the so-called extended hospital medical staff as “hospital-associated multispecialty group practices” or “virtual organizations.” While some physician markets do indeed function as “communities,” with [...]

On Wednesday, Dec. 6, Health Affairs hosted a conference call among the authors of the primary papers in its Dec. 5 Web Exclusive package on hospital-physician relations: Chris Fleming (communications manager, Health Affairs): You all wrote very interesting papers for our package on hospital-physician relations, and I thought I would start things out by just [...]

American Public Health Association executive director Georges Benjamin spoke with Health Affairs deputy editor Parmeeth Atwal at the APHA annual meeting earlier this month in Boston about the meeting’s human rights theme, the association’s “Get Ready” program, and the future direction of public health. Atwal: I note that in this month’s issue of the American [...]

I am pleased to announce that after twenty-five years as a bimonthly print journal and six years in online publishing, Health Affairs has entered the blogosphere as a new means of engaging readers in the health policy debate. The journal is all about an ongoing dialogue on health policy issues of concern to a diverse [...]