Editor’s Note: This post was written by several of the 2007-08 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellows. These fellowships allow mid-career health services researchers and practitioners from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom to spend up to 12 months in the United States, conducting original research and working with leading U.S. health policy experts. The lead […]

The last week of February 2008 marked the first anniversary of the death of Deamonte Driver, the twelve-year-old-boy from Prince Georges’ County, Maryland who died from a tooth infection that spread to his brain. His death was another sorry statistic in the litany of sorry statistics about the disparities in health and access to health insurance […]

For your Leap Day reading pleasure, we offer here the list of Top 10 most-read Health Affairs Blog Posts of 2007. Next up—Top 10 for January-February 2008. Additional commenting always welcome.

INSURANCE: A Closer Look At HSAs
by Uwe Reinhardt
REFORM: Musings On SiCKO, July 4th, and Visions of America
by Sarah Dine
HEALTH REFORM: Redefining Health Care
by Michael E. […]

In the wake of the failure of the California health care reforms and the continuing focus on Massachusetts’ reforms, everyone in the American health care policy community seemed to be focused on mandates. They have also been the subject of reporting and opinion pieces for the last two days in the New York Times as […]

Does the fact that The Diving Bell and The Butterfly won the Golden Globe award for the best foreign movie tell us anything about French health care? Or does it tell us more about movies about health care, the artistic French vs. “The Ugly American”?
For the upcoming Academy Awards, Michael Moore’s health care movie, SiCKO, […]

As patient volumes in hospital emergency departments (EDs) are going up, waiting times to see an ED physician are getting longer, particularly for heart attack patients and those in need of the most immediate attention, according to a study by Harvard Medical School researchers at the Cambridge Health Alliance published today as a Health Affairs […]

In a lively 45-minute session near the end of a long day, representatives from eight leading presidential candidates (Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, McCain, Obama, Richardson, and Romney), along with Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, gathered on stage in front of more than 500 participants at Health Affairs’ 25th anniversary health policy summit, to […]

It’s the morning after President Bush’s veto of the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). How did a program that started out with such bipartisan support become the health policy wonk equivalent of all-out war? Today’s Health Wonk Review takes a look across the blogosphere for some health policy soul-searching.
Politico blogger Ben […]

The most-read post of September on the Health Affairs Blog was by Linda Aiken on Pennsylvania’s new legislation which focuses on tapping nurses and other health professionals to address health reform issues. Aiken, the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, also has the most-read blog post for […]

Expanding coverage to the forty-seven million Americans who now lack health insurance could greatly improve care for people who already are protected, according to a new study in the September-October issue of Health Affairs. Economists Mark Pauly of Wharton and José Pagán of the University of Texas-Pan American found that insured adults who live in communities […]

This morning the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the number of uninsured Americans jumped to 47 million in 2006, up from 44.8 million in 2005. In percentage terms, there were 15.8 percent of Americans without insurance in 2006, up from 15.3 percent in 2005. This also represents the sixth year in a row that the […]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued an early release of its 2006 National Health Interview Survey. Findings of note from The National Center for Health Statistics’ study:

In 2006, there were 43.6 million uninsured Americans.
Since 2001 the number of uninsured Americans has fluctuated between 41 million and 43.6 million.
The number of uninsured […]

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released a report on “Immigrants in the U.S. Health Care System: Five Myths That Misinform the American Public.” One of the hotly debated myths is the cost of medical care for such immigrants. A paper published in Health Affairs and cited in the new report found that “the foreign-born […]

Some of the liveliest discussions at this year’s AcademyHealth Meeting were on state reform. The Massachusetts legislation and now implementation has served as an engine for discussion for many previously jaded health systems scholars, reformers, and activists. With California now following Massachusetts’ lead in proposing universal coverage, many scholars are wondering how this scenario will […]

The spread of convenience clinics—or “McClinics”—has been debated across the health care blogosphere in recent weeks, stemming in part from Wal-Mart’s announcement that it plans to open hundreds in coming years. Yesterday, the subject was the question of the day on the Wall Street Journal’s health blog (sparked by a Journal op-ed by Grace-Marie Turner, president […]

In the wake of mounting drug safety problems, Congress is considering legislation that would strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory authority to assure the safety of medications. Policymakers and the public are debating how to strike the right balance between drug safety oversight, the benefits of bringing new medications to market and ways to […]

The sentiment “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has a strong foothold in the United States, as does the thought that it takes a whole lot to prove that something’s “broke.” Nonetheless, Americans are increasingly declaring that health insurance in this country is very badly broken. The reality, many say, is that insurance coverage […]

Health Affairs Blog is pleased to host the post-April Fool’s edition of the Health Wonk Review, the biweekly round-up of the best of health policy blogging. Just to show that policy wonks can have a sense of humor, Dmitriy Kruglyak at Trusted.MD blog posts a spoof endorsing a new, improved “Health 2.0.”
Universal Coverage. A new, improved U.S. […]

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told voters in Iowa this week, “We’re going to have universal health care when I’m president — there’s no doubt about that. We’re going to get it done.”
When asked about the failed health reform attempt while her husband was president, Sen. Clinton said: “I think we’re in a better position to […]

In a Dec. 12 Health Affairs Web Exclusive [free access until Dec. 26], Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO George Halvorson and two other Kaiser executives put forward a plan to cover 85 percent of California’s uninsured, and 98 percent of Californians overall, within two years. The plan, which includes an individual mandate and additional assistance […]