Health Affairs

The “Bipartisan Plan to Reduce our Nation’s Deficits” developed by the “Gang of Six (or Seven)”, a group of Senators from both parties, certainly is not something I would brag about before a group of Princeton students who, I routinely tell them, will have to grow up quickly to clean up the mess their parents... Read the rest of this entry »

A common theme among health reformers has been that the small-group and individual markets for health insurance are too concentrated and thus inadequately competitive. The proposed remedy is to have more independent insurers compete within local markets.  Reformers left of center on the ideological spectrum – President Obama prominent among them – advanced this thesis... Read the rest of this entry »

Many journalists have called and asked me what I have learned from watching the much heralded Health Care Summit at Blair House. Actually quite a bit, as the discourse there crystallized so clearly the ideological division that makes coherent and comprehensive health reform so difficult in this country, if not impossible. In thinking about this... Read the rest of this entry »

After decades of teaching, I view everything around me as a final exam and assign it letter grades. Naturally, I graded President Barack Obama’s speech as well. The overall grade is A–, a highly respectable grade at Princeton, although there is variation around this overall average for the different themes in the speech. The elegance... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: In the post below, Uwe Reinhardt proposes to move from the present, price-discriminatory system of private-sector pricing of health services toward an all-payer system that could serve as a transition to an eventual system based on bundled payments per episode of illness for acute care, or capitation for chronic care. In a response to... Read the rest of this entry »

Do high-deductible health insurance policies, coupled with tax preferred Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) championed by the Bush Administration and a number of health policy analysts, actually reduce rather than increase cost sharing for many groups? Dahlia K. Remler and Sherry A. Glied made this case in a Health Affairs paper which was quickly picked up... Read the rest of this entry »

In their recently published manifesto, Redefining Health Care (2006), Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg — hereafter simply PT — offer a utopian vision of a health system that might occur to anyone possessed of a modicum of common sense but not too familiar with the real world of health care.