Health Affairs

Poor childhood health caused by environmental factors, such as air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals, cost the United States $76.6 billion in 2008, according to a new study in the May issue of Health Affairs. This price tag represents a dramatic increase,  from 2.8 percent of total health care costs in 1997 to 3.5... Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, on Wednesday,  May 4, Health Affairs will hold a Washington D.C. briefing in connection with its first ever issue on environmental health. National environmental health and policy experts will discuss the state of environmental health and its future, and will present new research in the field. The briefing and Health Affairs issue on environmental... Read the rest of this entry »

Health Affairs today adds a new Medical Education recording to its free collection of Narrative Matters essays on iTunes U. The account was written by Fitzhugh Mullan, a physician and clinical professor of pediatrics and public health at the George Washington University and the original editor of the “Narrative Matters” section. The essay, “Me And... Read the rest of this entry »

All eyes are focused on the many state challenges to health reform.  Florida’s recent federal court decision held the entire health reform law unconstitutional, based on the unconstitutionality of the mandate requiring all U.S. citizens to maintain a minimum level of health insurance coverage beginning in 2014, or pay a penalty.  Virginia’s earlier decision severed... Read the rest of this entry »

When Don Berwick, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, spoke at the National Health Policy Conference yesterday, one of the priorities listed in his presentation was coordinating eligibility among Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the new state health insurance exchanges provided for under the Affordable Care Act. A paper in the... Read the rest of this entry »

A new Health Policy Brief from Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation describes recent efforts by the US Department of Health and Human Services HHS to identify and enroll approximately 5 million uninsured children in the United States who are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This process also... Read the rest of this entry »

We may never know the motivations behind the horrific acts in Tucson and whether they could have been prevented. Mental illness, however, has been tentatively identified as a “suspect” in the shootings.   If we are to learn anything from this tragedy, we must look at mental health as a public health issue and give it... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of posts by Timothy Jost on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.  Earlier posts analyze provisions governing premium review, medical loss ratios, insurance exchanges, coverage for pre-existing conditions, appeals of coverage denials, coverage for preventive services, a patient bill of rights, grandfathered plans, tax-exempt hospitals, the small employer tax... Read the rest of this entry »

Between 2007 and 2009, with increasing unemployment and declining incomes, the number of uninsured nonelderly Americans increased from forty-five million to fifty million. This finding is contained in a Health Affairs Web First article released today and authored by John Holahan, the director of the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center. The Urban Institute study was prepared in partnership with the Kaiser... Read the rest of this entry »

A recent front-page article in the New York Times conveyed grim news about patient safety. The first large-scale study of hospital safety in a decade concluded that care has not gotten significantly safer since the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 estimate of up to 98,000 preventable deaths and 1 million preventable injuries annually. What for me... Read the rest of this entry »

AcademyHealth, a professional society for health services researchers and health policy analysts, today announced that Lisa Simpson would be the new president and CEO of the organization and its advocacy arm, the Coalition for Health Services Research. Simpson is currently the director of the Child Policy Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and... Read the rest of this entry »

A major new national initiative in comparative effectiveness research is under way, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and 2009 stimulus legislation. The research is aimed at giving patients, health care providers and those paying the bill for health care far better information than ever on which to base health care decisions, as well as... Read the rest of this entry »

The number of people with health insurance decreased to 253.6 million in 2009 from 255.1 million in 2008, the Census Bureau reported today. This is the first time that the number of people with health insurance has decreased since 1987, the first year that comparable health insurance data were collected. The ranks of those with... Read the rest of this entry »

U.S. health spending is projected to reach nearly $4.6 trillion by 2019, growing at an average annual rate over the next decade of 6.3 percent, according to economists at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).  By 2019, health care is projected to account for nearly one of every five U.S. dollars spent, or... Read the rest of this entry »

At the beginning of this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched an initiative called Connecting Kids to Coverage, designed to identify (and subsequently enroll) the nearly five million uninsured children thought to be eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). In the past it had been difficult... Read the rest of this entry »

The new health reform law charges the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with testing new payment and delivery models intended to improve health outcomes and restrain costs. But as the July issue of Health Affairs, published yesterday, points out, implementing all of these activities will require a combination of flexibility, leadership, coordination,... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Earlier posts by Timothy Jost provide analyses of regulations implementing provisions of the new health reform legislation governing grandfathered plans, tax exempt hospitals, the small employer tax credit, the Web portal, reinsurance for early retirees, and young adult coverage.  On June 22, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury released interim final regulations... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Other posts by Timothy Jost provide analyses of regulations implementing provisions of the new health reform legislation governing standards for tax-exempt hospitals, the Web portal, reinsurance for early retirees, and  the small employer tax credit. On Monday, May 10, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury jointly released Interim Final Rules for... Read the rest of this entry »

The White House’s Task Force on Childhood Obesity, headed by First Lady Michelle Obama, today released recommendations to the President designed to lower the child obesity rate from about 20 percent now to 5 percent in 2030.  Currently, one out of three children is overweight or obese, the Task Force report points out. Child obesity is significantly correlated... Read the rest of this entry »

In March 2010, Congress enacted substantial health reform measures intended to increase access to affordable insurance, reduce the number of uninsured people, and reform both the health insurance market and the health care delivery system. The lion’s share of these reforms will take effect in 2014. However, some reforms go into effect well before that... Read the rest of this entry »