Health Affairs

Editor’s Note: In the October issue of Health Affairs, Steven Pearson and Peter Bach proposed a new Medicare payment model incorporating comparative effectiveness research. Under the model, services offering greater health benefits than an existing alternative would receive cost-based reimbursement, but services offering benefits only comparable to an existing alternative would receive a “reference price” equal to... Read the rest of this entry »

As someone who has spent the last several years promoting the development of a comparativeness effectiveness center that would encourage the production of more objective information about what works medically, for whom, and under what circumstances, it is hard not to feel discouraged by the reaction to the breast cancer screening guidelines recently announced by... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This is the seventh and last post in a Health Affairs Blog series on Medicare physician compensation and the Sustainable Growth Rate mechanism. Paul Ginsburg, Robert Berenson, Mina Matin, Jay Crosson, Frank Opelka, and Eugene Rich have contributed earlier posts. One of the advantages of coming last in a series of blog postings is that I can... Read the rest of this entry »

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... Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg are experts in strategy and innovation, but, for better or for worse, they are relative newcomers to the health care arena. As a result, the language they use in Redefining Health Care often differs from the terms used by health policy analysts, even when their diagnoses and prescriptions are... Read the rest of this entry »