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 […]

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part blog by several of the 2006-2007 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellows. The post below 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 of their blog, which will appear on […]

In an interview published online at Health Affairs [2-week free access], David Eddy, founder and medical director of Archimedes Inc. in Aspen, Colorado, discusses evidence-based medicine (EBM) with Sean Tunis, founder and director of the Center for Medical Technology Policy in San Francisco. Archimedes was founded to improve the quality and efficiency of health care […]

Why are consumers encouraged — indeed virtually required — to make choices among Medicare Part D plans, but discouraged from making choices about airbags, and prohibited from choosing to accept higher wages in return for accepting certain health risks in the workplace? Why are physicians and patients allowed to take on the risks associated with […]

Consumer-directed plans “pre-lash,” presidential candidates’ health reform plans, and more are discussed on the latest edition of the Health Wonk Review. This round of the biweekly health policy blog overview is hosted by Richard Eskow of The Sentinel Effect.

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 […]

The Washington Convention Center was abuzz as nearly 2,000 health industry and policy wonks gathered for the 4th annual World Health Care Congress. The standard policy topics of cost, quality, and coverage were up for debate, along with competition, effectiveness, transparency, and, of course, reform. For comprehensive blogging on the event, check out the official […]

The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution was founded to advance opportunity and prosperity through broad-based growth, economic security, and effective government. Perhaps no issue is more important in all of these regards than health care.
Today we are releasing three specific proposals to promote affordability and effectiveness in health care. This summer we’ll release several […]

It’s Health Wonk Review week! Oh, and the State of the Union was delivered, too. Even though the deadline for entries to this edition of the best of health policy blogging was 9 am the morning after, many bloggers were already debating the president’s foray into health reform.
The President’s plan. Robert Laszewski on the new Health […]

Amid all the post-election crystal-gazing, one of the few safe inferences so far is that voter worries about health care were a powerful source of discontent; and that if the war in Iraq de-escalates over the next two years, affordable access to care is likely to emerge as a major issue in the 2008 elections. […]

Two kinds of American exceptionalism emerged from last week’s release of the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Policy Survey, which focused on primary care and was published November 2 on the Health Affairs Web site.

How might the chronically ill be safeguarded in a world of high-deductible, “consumer-directed” health insurance? During an October 2005 roundtable, cosponsored by Health Affairs and the California HealthCare Foundation, some answers were provided by two dozen leaders from the insurance, clinical, purchaser, consumer, and regulatory communities. Jill Yegian, the CHCF health insurance director, presents the […]

Early returns suggest that “consumer-directed” health plans can restrain health care costs and utilization, but whether these high-deductible plans can accomplish this without deterring consumers from seeking needed care is still up for debate. So state economist Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin and colleagues at RAND in an article [2-week free access] published today on the Health […]

Michael Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg’s overall vision for health care delivery is an archipelago of free-standing Integrated Practice Units (IPUs), each focused on the total cycle of care for a medical condition. This contrasts to the view of competition among integrated delivery systems (IDSs) [2-week free access] that organize or arrange comprehensive health services […]