Health Affairs

Americans increasingly distrust what they perceive as poorly run and conflicted government. Yet rarely can we see far enough inside the federal apparatus to examine what works and what doesn’t, or to inspect how good and bad decisions come to pass. Comparing the behaviors of two influential federal advisory bodies provides valuable lessons about how... Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Rita Redberg MD, a cardiologist and Chief Editor of Archives of Internal Medicine, described the American health system’s penchant for delivering high volumes of “procedures and devices [to] patients who get no benefit and incur risks from them.” The culprit, of course, is fee-for-service reimbursement, used by Medicare, Medicaid and commercial... 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 »