Health Affairs

As a professional working and living in Malawi, I have seen firsthand the country’s health challenges. Landlocked with poor health indicators, Malawi suffers from a high maternal mortality:  637 mothers die for every 100,000 live births. And there are fears that this number may be even higher: public health facilities face frequent and prolonged drug [...]

The number of young people entering the nursing profession is surging, providing relief from the recent nursing shortage, according to an article in the December Health Affairs, released yesterday. Aggressive efforts to make nursing a more attractive career choice have helped spur a 62 percent increase in the number of younger nurses (ages 23–26) entering [...]

Three dental clinics and two dental hygienists serve the 40,000 Lakota Sioux residents of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in North Dakota, an area the size of Connecticut. By comparison, at a typical private dental clinic, there is one hygienist for every 2,000 people, writes Maxine Brings Him Back-Janis in the Narrative Matters section of [...]

Editor’s Note: There are ongoing legal and policy debates regarding the role of the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC) in advising the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on relative Medicare payment rates for different types of physician services. Below, Brian Klepper and David Kibbe argue for ending the RUC’s role in the Medicare [...]

Significant steps are being taken to implement the Affordable Care Act (ACA) even as the challenges to its constitutionality make their way through the federal courts.  For example, the Institute of Medicine recently released its much-anticipated report to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on the principles and methods that should guide the design [...]

The federal government is spending a lot to support working-age people with disabilities. Federal outlays in fiscal year 2008 for this population totaled $357 billion – representing 12 percent of all federal spending.  By way of comparison, the federal government spent $616 billion for national defense in the same year. States spent another $71 billion on federal-state [...]

One of American politics’ most disingenuous conceits is that health care must cost what we currently pay. Another is that the only way to make it cost less is to deny care. It has been in industry executives’ financial interests to perpetuate these myths, but most will acknowledge privately that the way we value and [...]

Editor’s Note: In addition to Brian Klepper and Paul Fischer (photos and bios above), this article is authored by Kathleen Anne Behan, a skilled trial and corporate lawyer who provides advice to a range of individual and corporate clients. She has 20 years of experience practicing law, including as a partner with Arnold & Porter LLP, and [...]

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 [...]

Editor’s Note” As David Blumenthal prepares to step down as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, where does the United States stand in the continuing effort to promote widespread adoption of electronic health records? What are the challenges that the next health IT coordinator will face? Health Affairs Blog asked two leading experts to [...]

Editor’s Note” As David Blumenthal prepares to step down as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, where does the United States stand in the continuing effort to promote widespread adoption of electronic health records? What are the challenges that the next health IT coordinator will face? Health Affairs Blog asked two leading experts to [...]

While Congress’ recent efforts to repeal the healthcare reform legislation signed by President Obama last year may have been ‘dead on arrival,’ efforts to dismantle the bill continue, and likely will for months to come. Rather than simply repeat the same battles again and again, legislators on both sides of the aisle might also take [...]

Health Affairs has launched The Care Span, a new ongoing section of the journal, in its March 2011 edition. The Care Span will examine the topics of aging and disability, not as isolated experiences but as part of the full span of life. Toward this end, the journal aims to bring together the best current [...]

Recently it was reported that the federal government has issued more than a thousand waivers concerning various provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Some of the earliest and most high-profile waiver requests involved the McDonald’s restaurant chain, whose capped benefit “mini-med” plans, — provided by McDonald’s to 30,000 hourly employees, about 8 percent of all [...]

Over the next decade I believe we are going to see a major transformation of American medicine. It won’t be the kind of transformation that is normally discussed at health care conferences and at inside-the-Beltway briefings. Nor will it be the kind of change anticipated by the people who gave us the Affordable Care Act [...]

Newly trained physicians who are women are being paid significantly lower salaries than their male counterparts, according to a new study published in the February issue of Health Affairs, released today. The authors identify an unexplained gender gap in starting salaries for physicians that has been growing steadily since 1999, increasing from a difference of $3,600 [...]

The recent elections completely changed the nation’s political landscape in Congress and elsewhere. As two of the nation’s most respected and insightful political analysts, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute are well-suited to make sense of the new terrain; they are also two of the confirmed speakers for the 2011 National Health Policy [...]

The federal government’s unsustainable long-run fiscal picture has been outlined in successive versions of the Congressional Budget Office’s Long-Term Budget Outlook.  The policy problem is that spending rises above any reasonable level of taxation for the indefinite future.  As it currently stands, committed federal expenditures are expected to grow from 20 percent of gross domestic [...]

Health care is evolving at a dizzying pace, with countless scientific and technological breakthroughs to help physicians provide the best possible care for patients. During this historic time of health system change, physician education and training needs to keep pace with innovation and societal shifts. Recently I had the privilege of participating in a historic conference [...]

In the national debate leading up to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), President Obama said on several occasions that he would veto any bill that did not lower the growth rate of health care spending. So now that the Act is law, you would expect to find a lot [...]