The Kaiser Family Foundation reports findings from a new poll today that 29 percent of Americans cite health care as one of the most important issues of public concern. The war in Iraq was cited most often (44 percent). The poll is the first in a series by KFF. The foundation will continue to track […]

Venerable newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe have recently launched blogs focused on health care. The WSJ Health Blog focuses on the business of health with many posts on pharmaceutical and other health care industry news. Boston Globe’s White Coat Notes features news from the Boston-area medical community.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told voters in Iowa this week, “We’re going to have universal health care when I’m president — there’s no doubt about that. We’re going to get it done.”
When asked about the failed health reform attempt while her husband was president, Sen. Clinton said: “I think we’re in a better position to […]

Disparities in access to quality health care remain prevalent in the U.S. health care system. So states the National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR) to Congress. The NHDR and its companion, the National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR), both produced by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), have served for years as critical gauges of […]

We want to thank those who contributed to a lively debate about our book, Redefining Health Care. James Robinson sums up our argument succinctly: “Porter and Teisberg appropriately emphasize the central role of the organization and delivery of care, putting it ahead of insurance, consumer choice, employer purchasing, and government regulation. Of course, payment, choice, […]

We’re hosting the next edition of the Health Wonk Review here at the Health Affairs Blog. So health policy bloggers, please email me your best recent policy-oriented post by Wednesday, April 4 at 9 am. Along with the link to your blog and to your post, please include a sentence or two about the post–basically […]

A new edition of the biweekly Health Wonk Review is now up at The Health Care Blog. Host Matthew Holt provides a lively round-up of health policy blogging from such diverse places as Cato@Liberty, Health Blawg, Healthcare Economist, and, of course, Health Affairs Blog.

Medicare is often cited as our greatest domestic health care program — troubled only by its widely acknowledged financial distress. Indeed, many liberal reformers point to Medicare as the model to follow for covering everyone. Paul Krugman (N.Y Times subscription required) even advocates Medicare expansion as the best way to get the “special interests” out […]

Hope and weariness rise together in the hearts of the faithful as the 2008 election season begins, with de-escalation in Iraq open for debate and a barrage of serious-looking health insurance expansion proposals reverberating on the domestic policy front. In a culture of consumer gratification, it will be risky for politicians to raise the issue […]

The current debates in the Congress about both the supplemental bill to augment current State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) shortfalls and the reauthorization of SCHIP for the next five years have produced many proposals swearing fealty to the prominence of children in our values and society. Even those opposing expansion of SCHIP do so […]

Biotechnology firms constitute a subsector of the larger pharmaceutical industry (“drug companies with needles,” we call them), but to date have been spared from the blood sport of American health punditry, pharma-bashing. While drug firms routinely are castigated for their sins, real and imagined, biotech firms have been appreciated as innovative and entrepreneurial startups (rather […]

Clayton Christensen is one of America’s most influential business thinkers and writers. A professor at Harvard Business School, Christensen is perhaps best known for his writings on disruptive innovation in such books as The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. In an interview I conducted with Christensen, he argues that the answer for more affordable […]

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 […]

Joe Paduda, one of the founders of the Health Wonk Review, has posted an excellent edition of the biweekly health policy blog round-up over on his blog, Managed Care Matters. He leads with Sarah Dine’s recent post on SCHIP from the Health Affairs Blog and covers the waterfront of health policy blogosphere debate.

This post is based on testimony at a hearing of the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Health, March 6, 2007.
The primary problem with the SGR [sustainable growth rate] is that while it controls total spending by physicians, it does not affect the volume and intensity of spending by individual physicians. In fact, there […]

As Congress and the nation’s governors wrangle with the Bush administration over how much the federal government should spend on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which expires September 30, an article in the March/April 2007 issue of Health Affairs concludes that SCHIP has been a success over its first decade, lowering uninsurance rates […]

One of the hallmarks of SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) has been state flexibility and innovation. Many advocates for children did not warmly embrace the original legislation creating SCHIP. Some Democrats, such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), feared that creating an insurance program that was not an entitlement and not tied to federal […]

New health spending projections; thoughts on the President’s health plan; and the proliferation of health reform proposals attracted readers this past month on the Health Affairs Blog. Continued comments are always welcome. 
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