Health Affairs

In the battle over bending the cost curve in Medicare, a recent article in Health Affairs should set off alarms.  In it, Francis Lukas and colleagues describe the proliferation of new cardiac surgery programs—300 in 10 years–at exactly the same time that the number of cardiac bypass grafts fell.  Moreover, the new programs generally did... 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 »

The train has left the station. Everyone is on board: health policy leaders both public, like the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and private, like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and the Commonwealth Fund; influential medical societies like the American College of Physicians and the American College... Read the rest of this entry »