Health Affairs

Editor’s note: Kathryn Gilbert, a J.D. candidate at the University of Michigan Law School, is a coauthor of this post, in addition to Jill Horwitz and Helen Levy (photos and linked bios above). The case that will decide the fate of the most important piece of health care legislation in the past fifty years has,... Read the rest of this entry »

If one were to try and identify what issue has most roiled the biomedical community in the past few months it is surely the effort to censor two papers describing genetic modifications of the H5N1 flu virus. Background.  Last December, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) was asked by the U.S. National... Read the rest of this entry »

Planned and unplanned disruptions in production of drugs are behind an overwhelming share of drug shortages.  Stockpiling the finished product has been proposed as a solution for preventing future shortages.  The general idea is that the federal government would purchase and stockpile select drugs, just as it does with vaccines and anti-bioterrorism agents.  This would... Read the rest of this entry »

“A child is not a small adult,” but an adolescent is not a large child.  Adult oncologists, reluctant to care for cancer patients under the age of 16, believe that adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients should be within their purview.  We believe younger cancer patients are a special group needing special attention, even... Read the rest of this entry »

In the December Health Affairs Narrative Matters essay, multiple sclerosis patient Maran Wolston describes how she lost trust in her physician when she found out he was receiving payments from drug companies. Wolston says she was fortunate to be able to look up these payments in a Minnesota state database, and she applauds the establishment of... Read the rest of this entry »

In the newest Health Affairs Narrative Matters essay, a seventeen-year-old West African immigrant who’s off to college says her facial bruising was inflicted by her father, and a young pediatrician learns about — and rethinks — the process of reporting child abuse and working with Child Protective Services. The essay, “Oh, My Father Hit Me,”... Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re traveling over the long weekend, you’ll want to take along some reading material. While some might reach for a good novel by John Grisham or Dan Brown, the health policy blogs in this edition of the Health Wonk Review tackle equally compelling mysteries. Was the Medicare Trustees report really that gloomy? If Workers... Read the rest of this entry »

The challenge of reining in the rising costs of the Medicare Program is particularly thorny because it confronts a recalcitrant societal tension between the necessity for cost control and the value of open-ended technology use for life extension in the later years. That tension is becoming more deeply entrenched because a growing number of older... Read the rest of this entry »

For the past two years, debate as to whether health reform would result in rationing has underscored the contradiction between the health care Americans would like to have and what we’re actually willing to pay for it.  One may note that the terms budgeting and rationing are synonymous – especially today in an era of... Read the rest of this entry »

In “Shock Me, Tube Me, Line Me,” a Narrative Matters essay in the February 2010 issue of Health Affairs, emergency physician Boris Veysman sets forth his own version of an advance directive and challenges common perceptions about care at the end of life. An excerpted version of Veysman’s essay appears in today’s Washington Post Health... Read the rest of this entry »

As uncomfortable as it is for many Americans to accept, allocation issues are a permanent feature of our health care system, “reformed” or not.  Who should get the H1N1 flu vaccine first? In a flu pandemic or a biological disaster, who should be put on respirators and who should not?  These hard choices are realities,... Read the rest of this entry »

The newly released November-December 2009 edition of Health Affairs features a series of articles on the challenges posed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  The articles focus on steps policymakers can take to change the dynamics of the pandemic so that millions of lives will be saved, infections prevented, and overall costs made more affordable. Publication of the... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: The post below by Merrill Goozner first appeared on The Values and Health Reform Connection, a site run by the Hastings Center and supported by Health Affairs as a media sponsor. Goozner’s post can also be found on his blog GoozNews on Health. The Values and Health Reform Connection grew out of the Hastings Center Publication “Connecting... Read the rest of this entry »

By the fourth sentence of the preface to The Silent World of Doctor and Patient, Jay Katz has quietly issued a startling challenge to a fundamental principle of the doctor-patient relationship. He writes: It took time before I appreciated fully the oddity of physicians’ insistence that patients follow doctors’ orders. During my socialization as a... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: In an interview published this week, Health Affairs Contributing Editor Barbara Culliton asks Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Associate Commissioner For Science, Norris Alderson, about his agency’s regulation of nanomedicine and the potential for health care cost savings. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation: Barbara Culliton: Nanomedicine is the “next big thing” in... Read the rest of this entry »

The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review–the biweekly roundup of posts from the health policy blogosphere–is now up at Roy Poses’ blog, Health Care Renewal. He defines his blog as “the product of brain-storming by some physicians and health care researchers who wondered why as health care costs inexorably rose, access decreased, and quality remained stagnant.”... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: As Health Affairs celebrates its 25th anniversary, we look back at some health policy highlights of the past quarter century—many of which are still highly relevant to today’s debates. Watch this space for regular postings on the “classics.” On June 12, 1986, the Wall Street Journal stated: “If you read nothing else this... Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when a government agency in charge of assessing the effectiveness of medical interventions crunches numbers and tells pharmaceutical companies their drugs are just too expensive? Sometimes, the government gets a better deal. Twice last week, the much-feared National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England and Wales was a factor in... Read the rest of this entry »

The human rights theme of this year’s APHA Convention in Boston was, I think, just right. The group I belong to, APHA’s Health law Forum, is now better known as the “Health Law and Human Rights Forum.” This is because public health and human rights seem made for each other, as it is impossible for... Read the rest of this entry »

Par Atwal does a wonderful job reminding us about the legacy of Jonathan Mann, a dear friend and colleague. But despite Mann’s prodigious contributions, what can we say about his vision today? Certainly, his work and inspiration have virtually created the field. We believed that our course at Harvard on health and human rights was... Read the rest of this entry »