Health Affairs

We are pleased to announce the “most-read” Health Affairs journal articles published in 2010. The number 1 article published in 2010 with more than 44,000 pageviews was ”What Changes In Survival Rates Tell Us About US Health Care,” by Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied from the November 2010 issue of Health Affairs. The most-viewed... Read the rest of this entry »

A new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation describes recent efforts by the US Department of Health and Human Services HHS to identify and enroll approximately 5 million uninsured children in the United States who are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This process also... Read the rest of this entry »

Use of fluoride is known to reduce tooth decay. Earlier this month, the federal government announced plans to lower the amount of fluoride in water because of concerns that some children were receiving too much of it. This prompted me to revisit the subject of oral health and what some foundations around the country have... Read the rest of this entry »

The success of health reform depends on the efforts of both the public and private sectors. At the 2011 National Health Policy Conference (NHPC), newly confirmed speakers include leading players in both of those realms. Don Berwick, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will kick off the conference. And Ronald Williams,... Read the rest of this entry »

Below, Kavita Patel, former director of policy for the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, discusses President Obama’s State of the Union address and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Republican response. See other posts on this topic by Len Nichols and Joseph Antos.  The Constitution mandates that the President “from time to time... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Below, Joseph Antos, the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, discusses President Obama’s State of the Union address. See other posts on this topic by Len Nichols and Kavita Patel.  In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama said the key to winning the future is... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Below, Len Nichols, Professor of Health Policy and Director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University, discusses President Obama’s State of the Union address and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Republican response. See other posts on this topic by Kavita Patel and Joseph Antos.  In last night’s State... Read the rest of this entry »

As Web administrator of ScanGrants, a free online database of funding opportunities in the health sciences, I spend hours trying to find grants, fellowships, science prizes, and scholarships in the health sciences to list on the site. I am doing this so that students, physicians, scientists, nurse researchers, public health experts, and health services researchers... Read the rest of this entry »

Certainly no Medicare provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has generated more interest among health care providers, policy analysts, and consultants than the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) for accountable care organizations (ACOs).  Because there are so many design elements for which the Secretary of Health and Human Services must “determine”, “establish”, and “specify”... Read the rest of this entry »

The federal government is taking a bigger role in promoting the development of new drugs, in reaction to the slow pace of innovative treatments being generated by the pharmaceutical industry. For example, in Sunday’s New York Times, Gardiner Harris discusses the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the new drug development initiative which the National Institutes of Health... Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t keep up with the latest twists and turns in healthy policy, you probably don’t know what value-based health insurance benefits are. A Health Affairs article takes a focused look at it. Here is my layman’s summary: If you are like most people, you are not a very good consumer of health care.... Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Managed Care Matters, Joe Paduda presents a collection of the best in health policy blogging in today’s edition of the Health Wonk Review. Joe highlights Jeff Goldsmith’s Health Affairs Blog post, in which Jeff suggests an approach to solving Medicare’s physician reimbursement dilemma.

As the Republican-controlled House prepares to vote today to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the debate continues on the consequences of repeal for the federal budget. Full-scale repeal of the ACA will surely die in the Democratic Senate, but the fiscal arguments will continue over the next two years and through the 2012 elections, and perhaps... Read the rest of this entry »

In late December, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked approval of the cancer drug Avastin for metastatic breast cancer. The decision set off a firestorm of reaction: the right condemned the denial of a potential life-saving drug for breast cancer patients, while the left cheered the withdrawal of an expensive drug that seemed to offer little... Read the rest of this entry »

Today I want to tell you about a blog post published recently on the John A. Hartford Foundation’s health AGEnda blog. Its focus is patient-centered care. This post does not contain theoretical or hypothetical musings about that topic, and it is not a dry recitation of facts. Instead, the information presented here is very real,... Read the rest of this entry »

A new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation describes new incentives under the Affordable Care Act for small business owners to provide health insurance coverage for their employees. Employees of small businesses are least likely among all employed workers to have health coverage. Millions have also lost coverage in recent years... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: In the post below, Caroline Poplin takes a skeptical look at Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and the trends they represent. For more on ACOs from various perspectives, readers can consult the January issue of Health Affairs, released on Thursday, January 6, titled “Accountable Care Organizations: Making Them Work.” Physicians have doubtless been issuing jeremiads since... Read the rest of this entry »

Mental illness has been on the minds of many people this week, after the shootings in Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday. A University of Virginia forensic clinical psychologist and professor says in a CNN.com opinion piece this week, “The rampage shooting in Arizona is another anguishing reminder that mental health is the weakest link in our... Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the ghosts that haunt the Medicare program, none has been noisier, scarier or rattled more chains than the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) problem.   SGR has required Congress to reset physician payment policy almost every year for the last decade to avoid gutting Medicare physician compensation, a recurring reminder of how difficult Medicare... Read the rest of this entry »

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein recently described the Obama administration’s consistent efforts to improve troubled private markets: Isolate the eight key economic decisions of the Obama presidency: The intervention in the financial sector, the intervention in the auto sector, the intervention in the housing sector, the stimulus package, the health-care bill, financial regulation, and the... Read the rest of this entry »