Health Affairs

Editor’s Note: Economists Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation and Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution have different worldviews when it comes to how best to allocate scarce health care resources, but on one subject they have come to strongly agree: a way to end the political impasse in Washington [free access article] and make [...]

Congress is on the verge of passing legislation mandating that health plans cover mental health (MH) and substance abuse treatment to the same extent that they cover other medical and surgical treatment. In a study published December 18 on the Health Affairs Web site, researchers say that passage of either the Senate or House version of this [...]

Perhaps the signal event in federal health policy for 2007 is the failure to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). On Wednesday, December 13, President Bush vetoed the second version of the SCHIP reauthorization.

David Harlow has posted a terrific Health Wonk Review over on HealthBlawg. He takes his turn at hosting the biweekly round-up of the best of health policy blogging and gives the write-up a “holiday lights” twist. He illuminates for readers some great posts on health reform on the campaign trail and beyond.

Galaxies ago, in a decade far, far away, genius entrepreneur Jim Clark launched Healtheon on the premise that one giant Internet portal could unscramble all of health care’s tangled lines of communication, rectify its inefficiencies, and soothe its troubled soul in one brilliant masterstroke. It sounded good. The Internet was young, and people believe what [...]

A recent Health Affairs article by Columbia University’s Sherry Glied and coauthors is figuring prominently in the debate over whether to require individuals to purchase health insurance as part of the proposals to achieve universal coverage. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY) and former Sen. John Edwards (NC) have [...]

Yesterday, Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag entered the blogosphere. Orszag says he will use his blog to talk about CBO’s work and the analysts behind it. Orszag’s blogging debut has been noted widely in other blogs, such as that of fellow economist Brad DeLong. On his blog, economist Greg Mankiw poses this question: ”I wonder: Will Peter Orszag [...]

Will health information technology (IT) be the silver bullet to create value in the health care sector? Michael O. Leavitt, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) discusses health IT and other health system management issues in an interview with Leonard Schaeffer, founding chairman and CEO of WellPoint, Inc., and currently [...]

Editor’s Note: Lammot du Pont, and Helen Pfister of Manatt Health Solutions are also coauthors of this post. The post is an edited version of a longer article written with guidance and support from the California HealthCare Foundation; the Community Clinics Initiative, a project of Tides and the California Endowment; the Colorado Health Foundation; and the RCHN Community Health Foundation. As the health care [...]

Last week, Health Affairs published three interviews [one-week free access] that I conducted with leading cancer oncologists. As Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, and I wrote in an introduction to these interviews: “An intellectual chasm exists between those who do innovative research and those who deliver it. Researchers and physician-scientists read different journals than their counterparts in health policy [...]

Over the past two months, highly read posts on the Health Affairs Blog looked at President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a new report from the Congressional Budget Office on health spending trends, analysis of the number of uninsured Americans, and discussion of health reform solutions. Posts with a global [...]