Coverage: Cost proved to be a key factor in choice of Part D plans by Medicare enrollees. A paper published last week in Health Affairs reports that only 4 percent of the 22.5 million Part D enrollees are in plans offering doughnut-hole coverage for both brand-name and generic drugs. Author Juliette Cubanski, a principal policy [...]

Michael Cannon at Cato-at-liberty blog hosts the new Health Wonk Review. His round up of the best of health care blogging over the past 2 weeks includes such topics as Medicare administered pricing, biotech drug pricing, HSAs, health care spending, and more. Great post-Thanksgiving smorgasbord of reading.

A national survey of about 1500 Americans finds that 60% believe smokers should pay higher insurance premiums, and 30% believe obese individuals should pay more. “When it comes to personal responsibility, consumers increasingly support making people pay more for unhealthy behavior,” write researchers from NORC at the University of Chicago in their Nov. 14 Health [...]

The human rights theme of this year’s APHA Convention in Boston was, I think, just right. The group I belong to, APHA’s Health law Forum, is now better known as the “Health Law and Human Rights Forum.” This is because public health and human rights seem made for each other, as it is impossible for [...]

Par Atwal does a wonderful job reminding us about the legacy of Jonathan Mann, a dear friend and colleague. But despite Mann’s prodigious contributions, what can we say about his vision today? Certainly, his work and inspiration have virtually created the field. We believed that our course at Harvard on health and human rights was [...]

The APHA is to be congratulated for choosing public health and human rights as the theme for this year’s meeting. Given the shenanigans of the Bush administration, this was a welcome political statement. In addition, even as there is support for human rights in the public health community, there remains insufficient clarity on the part [...]

The American Public Health Association (APHA), the oldest and largest organization of the public health community, chose public health and human rights as the theme of its 13,000 attendee-strong 2006 annual meeting, held earlier this month in Boston. The emphasis this year on human rights, according to APHA executive director Georges Benjamin, was driven in [...]

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 Journal [...]

At a November 14 panel discussion, Health Affairs released its November-December 2006 issue, titled “Will Employer Coverage Endure?” One of the panel members at the event was the always thought-provoking Mark Smith, president of the California HealthCare Foundation. Mark offered some fascinating comments taking apart the meaning of the term “insurance.” Below are excerpts from [...]

The Health Wonk Review is up at Health Business Blog today, nicely summarized by David Williams of MedPharma Partners. This biweekly round-up of health policy blogging highlights election commentary and an interesting array of health care conflicts. These include publishing conflicts of interest and Kaiser Permanente’s implementation of Epic, to name a few.

Amid all the post-election crystal-gazing, one of the few safe inferences so far is that voter worries about health care were a powerful source of discontent; and that if the war in Iraq de-escalates over the next two years, affordable access to care is likely to emerge as a major issue in the 2008 elections. [...]

Over•sight n. Supervision; watchful care. –American Heritage Dictionary
This week’s election results mean that the Congress will, for the first time in six years, be giving health programs “supervision” and “watchful care.”
• When the EPA fails to regulate toxic air pollutants, the Congress may soon request a briefing.
• When the CDC fails to update its information [...]

It would be easy for Republicans to be upset about the election and for Democrats to take this opportunity to seek retribution. And that might feel good for awhile. Or both parties could step forward and take advantage of what is likely to be the greatest opportunity to improve health care that this nation has [...]

Currently, the United States is short an estimated 150,000 nurses. Yet over the next decade, more than 650,000 new jobs in nursing will be created. At the same time, an estimated 450,000 nurses will have retired. By 2020, the nurse shortage is expected to increase to 800,000. I set out to debunk a number of [...]

Two kinds of American exceptionalism emerged from last week’s release of the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Policy Survey, which focused on primary care and was published November 2 on the Health Affairs Web site.

Jason Shafrin of the blog Healthcare Economist has posted a new edition of the Health Wonk Review. This roundup of the best of health policy blogging is hosted every two weeks by a different health policy/health care management blogger. Jason has neatly grouped this selection of posts into the following categories: Big Pharma, Illiterate Consumers, [...]