Editor’s Note: The post below by Harold Luft is an abridged version of a longer White Paper. The full White Paper and additional information about Dr. Luft’s work are also available.
The Current Options Under Discussion
There is substantial debate among Democrats about whether a public-plan option is a critical component of health reform; Republicans seem unified in opposing the idea. The “public plan” proposals [...]

A rise in chronic disease, particularly among baby boomers and older adults, was a key driver of the fact that consumers spent about 40 percent more out of pocket for health care in 2005 than in 1996, researchers report in the January/February 2009 issue of Health Affairs, a thematic volume on chronic illness.
The study shows that the [...]

The contrast could hardly have been more sharp. In a week when The New England Journal of Medicine published a series of perspectives exhorting the United States to reinvent primary care before it collapses, speakers at the annual international symposium of The Commonwealth Fund emphasized how primary care physicians formed the critical core of health-care [...]

Back in November, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee wrote a remarkably candid essay for a special election issue of the trade journal Modern Healthcare. Since then, the former Arkansas governor’s campaign has morphed from single-digit obscurity to mainstream prominence, and the candor on health care has mostly been scrubbed clean from his Web site. Nonetheless, [...]

By any measure, heart disease, once manifest by sudden death, has largely joined the ranks of chronic diseases in developed countries that can be managed by drugs and behavior, as several articles in the new January-February issue of Health Affairs devoted to Cardiovascular Disease & Society note. And of all diseases that have been [...]