If Congress creates a new national insurance exchange as part of health reform legislation, should a public plan be included as one of the options? That is the subject Jacob Hacker, Len Nichols, and Stuart Butler explored in a recent Health Affairs Blog roundtable. The full roundtable is posted here, and some of the highlights of the [...]

Editor’s Note: If Congress creates a new national insurance exchange as part of comprehensive health reform, should a public plan be offered as one of the choices for consumers? That contentious question was the subject of a Health Affairs Blog Roundtable including Stuart Butler, vice president, domestic and economic policy studies, at the Heritage Foundation; [...]

Last year Congress passed legislation prohibiting group health plans that provide mental health coverage from imposing stricter limits on mental health treatment than for other medical or surgical care. This marked a historical milestone for mental health care, burying the unscientific distinction between “mental” and “physical” illness. But although progress has been made in mental [...]

Editor’s Note: The author of this post, Merton Bernstein, would like to thank Dr. Christina Daw for her research assistance.
Science does not permit ideology to foreclose inquiry; it requires facing facts and following where they and logic lead. Hence many cheered when President Barack Obama announced that science is back, that predisposition will no longer be permitted [...]

Editor’s Note: Health Affairs is proud to be a media partner for the Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference, which will take place April 22 and 23 in Boston, Massachusetts. As part of the lead-up to the conference, which will focus on the interplay between the Health 2.0 and information therapy (Ix) movements, Health Affairs Blog [...]

Editor’s Note: Health Affairs is proud to be a media partner for the Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference, which will take place April 22 and 23 in Boston, Massachusetts. As part of the lead-up to the conference, which will focus on the interplay between the Health 2.0 and information therapy (Ix) movements, Health Affairs Blog [...]

Editor’s Note: Health Affairs is proud to be a media partner for the Health 2.0 Meets Ix conference, which will take place April 22 and 23 in Boston, Massachusetts. As part of the lead-up to the conference, which will focus on the interplay between the Health 2.0 and information therapy (Ix) movements, Health Affairs Blog and other participating [...]

For a long time, I have believed the greatest potential for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) is in the treatment of chronic illness. I even wrote some fictional vignettes in a “vision” chapter in the National Center for Policy Analysis’ Handbook On State Health Care Reform, describing how HSAs might work for diabetics and other patients. [...]

With the U.S. tab for health care approaching one dollar out of every five, a key question on the health reform agenda is how to achieve value in health care. Jeanne Lambrew, the new deputy director of the White House Office on Health Reform, spoke this morning to nearly 800 health policy wonks at the [...]

We are pleased to announce the “most-read” Health Affairs journal articles published in 2008. The number 1 article has topped 61,000 pageviews to date. The next two articles, which were published in September, analyzed the presidential candidates’ health plans. All articles below are open to all readers for the next 2 weeks—through January 28, 2009.

Measuring [...]

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 [...]

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 physician [...]

Sooner or later, we are all patients. This past weekend a group of journalists, doctors, advocates, health center leaders, technology experts, professors, and – yes – patients, gathered at Airlie House in Virginia to share stories and insights along the journey to improve health and health care. The small conference, “Patients and Policy Narratives: The [...]

Editor’s Note: This post continues a series on health information technology (IT). Yesterday Mark Leavitt rated health IT’s progress. Next up, a post by Esther Dyson. This blog series appears in tandem with new papers on the Health Affairs Web site [2-week free access], including a lead article on why we need to expand beyond narrowly focused standard setting to [...]

In June, Health Affairs Blog featured a series of guest posts on pay for performance and offered blogs from the Global Health Council meeting and Annual Research Meeting of AcademyHealth, both held in Washington, D.C. Sign up for email or RSS feed alerts to stay on top of new postings. Additional commenting always welcome.

Health Wonk [...]

PAIN
(Chicago, June 19 – June 21) I sit down at a circular table in the high-ceilinged meeting room and conversationally ask the two women already there what brought them to this three-day conference. The first replies that she had a daughter die from a medical mistake. The other, a nurse, lost a son to medical [...]

Health wonk week in Washington began this past Sunday with thousands of health services researchers descending on the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel for the annual research meeting of AcademyHealth. The organization started 25 years ago as the Association for Health Services Research under the late Alice Hersh, who believed health policymaking in Washington should be informed [...]

It is no great stretch to allow that “consumers” may have an important role to play in health economics. After all, it was a market response by premium payers that forced the insurance industry to back away from tightly managed care in the late 1990s. Nor is the idea of patient-centered care merely an idealistic [...]

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, [...]

Editor’s Note: This is part two of a two-part blog by several of the 2006-2007 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellows. Part one, which ran yesterday, describes the extent to which these international scholars felt able to make meaningful choices in their interactions with the American health care system. In part two below, the authors propose changes [...]