Health Affairs

In a recent Health Affairs paper, we documented that the United States has a significant survival advantage over much of Europe when it comes to cancer: 1.8 years for those diagnosed during our study window.  Furthermore, we showed over a 17-year period that this gap had widened, not narrowed, and that this widening was more... Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, Thursday April 12, Health Affairs will hold a briefing to unveil its April 2012 issue, “Issues In Cancer Care: Value, Costs & Quality.” The volume explores a range of cancer-related topics, with the centerpiece a cluster of articles on assessing the value of high-cost cancer treatments. Please join us for the briefing at the... Read the rest of this entry »

The United States spends more on cancer care than European countries. However, a study published in the newly released April issue of Health Affairs suggests that investment also generates a greater “value” for US patients, who typically live nearly two years longer than their European counterparts. Tomas Philipson, the Daniel Levin Chair in Public Policy... Read the rest of this entry »

Lung cancer screening would save thousands of lives at a relatively low cost if such tests were routinely covered by commercial insurers, according to a first-of-its-kind actuarial study in the April issue of Health Affairs. Lung cancer causes more than 150,000 deaths each year, making it the most lethal cancer in the United States. Yet... Read the rest of this entry »

Several papers in the March issue of Health Affairs expose some of the challenges with reporting information about health care quality to the public, including the shortcomings of hospital reporting, the importance of framing quality information in ways consumers can understand and apply to real-world decisions, and the need for more consumer-relevant measures.  Each paper... Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, April 12, Health Affairs will hold a briefing to unveil its April 2012 issue, “Issues In Cancer Care: Value, Costs & Quality.” The volume explores a range of cancer-related topics, with the centerpiece a cluster of articles on assessing the value of high-cost cancer treatments.  The cluster received funding support from Bristol-Myers Squibb;... Read the rest of this entry »

A key component of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010 has just been released with little fanfare. One of the most significant provisions in the law gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to regulate biosimilars, which are attempts to replicate some of the most complex medicines known as... Read the rest of this entry »

On November 8, 2011, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) solicited the public for feedback on Medicare’s controversial coverage with evidence development (CED) policy. Although CMS did not finalize the CED policy until 2006, the agency first applied the CED concept in 1995 through a national coverage determination (NCD) on lung volume reduction... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Below, William Sage analyzes Friday’s federal appellate court decision regarding the Affordable Care Act. See Timothy Jost’s earlier post for more on this decision. On August 12, a divided three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled in State of Florida v. Sibelius that the individual mandate contained... Read the rest of this entry »

Timothy Jost’s series of posts on proposed new federal rules for state health insurance exchanges leads July’s list of most-read Health Affairs Blog posts. Jon Kingsdale’s article on Massachusetts’ efforts to control health care costs is also featured on the list, as are Jeff Goldsmith’s discussion of the effect of health reform on employer-based health... Read the rest of this entry »

Section 1001 of the Affordable Care Act establishes women’s preventive health benefits as a new mandatory coverage class for all insurance products sold in the individual and group markets, self insured employer-sponsored health plans, and benchmark plans enrolling newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries.  In implementing the Act in accordance with the tight deadlines established under the... Read the rest of this entry »

The women recounted how their lives had been saved as they pleaded for the Food and Drug Administration not to withdraw approval for Avastin as a treatment for advanced breast cancer. They did so even without evidence that it provides benefit and with evidence that it confers risks. Their efforts were ultimately not successful: the... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: The authors of the post below, Dan Mendelson and Tanisha Carino, also wrote an earlier post on the initial decision of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to undertake a national coverage review of the cancer drug Provenge. In one of its most anticipated national coverage decisions (NCD), issued on March 30,... Read the rest of this entry »

In the December issue, Health Affairs published a series of papers on the effects of self-referral by physicians for imaging services. Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt spotlighted the set of papers in a Christmas Eve blog post in the New York Times’ Economix blog: A fascinating narrative on how private health insurers and Medicare have both... Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re looking for a transformation in health care, look first to America’s cities, towns and communities. That’s where it happens, among local men and women who deliver and receive care, and the employers and consumers who pay for it. That’s why the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the U.S. Department of Health and... Read the rest of this entry »

When physicians who aren’t radiologists refer patients to imaging facilities they own or lease—known as self-referral—their patients don’t always benefit. In fact, these self-referrals lead to overuse of services, escalate spending, and rarely shorten the duration of illness, according to a series of studies in the December issue of Health Affairs. The findings challenge what... Read the rest of this entry »

The world faces a public health crisis: growing numbers of bacteria are becoming resistant to available antibiotics, and there are few new antibiotics in the drug development pipeline. Writing in the September issue of Health Affairs, Aaron Kesselheim and Kevin Outterson propose an innovative approach to this dilemma. Their  proposal is designed to both increase... Read the rest of this entry »

According to the American College of Gastroenterology, colorectal cancer is currently the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. The colonoscopy is considered the “gold standard” for colon cancer detection. However, a new Health Affairs Web First study by researchers from RTI International demonstrates that for screening programs with limited budgets, using fecal... Read the rest of this entry »

Just over 1 in 4 dollars spent by the Medicare program last year was spent on someone who was in their last year of their life.  This is nothing new–the basic proportion has not changed since it was first noted in the 1970s.  Other nations that spend much less on health care nevertheless spend a similar... Read the rest of this entry »

It is clear to all informed persons that the nation needs better evidence of what works in health care, and this has propelled comparative effectiveness research (CER) policy developments of late.  However, for a number of—mainly political—reasons, recent Federal legislation separates the process of evidence generation and evidence synthesis from policy processes, e.g. Medicare coverage... Read the rest of this entry »