Health Affairs

UnitedHealth Group officials may have been laying protective cover for themselves when they attributed poor first-quarter earnings to a sagging economy last week. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true, as United said, that business is bad because the company’s products are getting too expensive for a growing number of workers and companies. Coming within [...]

Editor’s Note: Should drugmakers and medical device manufacturers be allowed to provide physicians with medical and scientific journal articles concerning uses of their products that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration? Recently, the FDA issued draft guidance that would permit this practice with certain regulatory restraints. In the post below, Jerome [...]

Editor’s Note: Should drugmakers and medical device manufacturers be allowed to provide physicians with medical and scientific journal articles concerning uses of their products that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration? Recently, the FDA issued draft guidance that would permit this practice within certain regulatory restraints. In the post below, Scott [...]

In interviews with Health Affairs, government ministers in Germany and the Netherlands talk up market-oriented refinements to their universal health insurance systems for the future. But the news from Europe isn’t all happy: an unsettling survey in the United Kingdom finds that some physicians believe that the market will unravel the government-owned and -operated National [...]

It’s been nearly five years since the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health issued its final report. The report affirmed the possibility of recovery and the effectiveness of available treatments for many conditions. But it also warned that many patients never find their way to care and that providers are often unaware of therapies [...]

Because the most glaring geographic variations in health care use have been observed in specialty and end-of-life care, policymakers have had trouble coming to terms with the work of John Wennberg and his Dartmouth colleagues. The questions the Dartmouth researchers raise about spending and quality are too disruptive, too threatening. Specialty and end-of-life care are [...]

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 [...]