In many countries, primary care clinicians serve as the foundation for health care and the “gatekeepers” for more specialized referrals. A new international survey of primary care physicians in eleven countries finds that American doctors are significantly behind many of their counterparts elsewhere in providing access to high-quality care and use of health information technology, [...]

Responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic and tackling so-called neglected tropical diseases are the focus of the November/December 2009 edition of Health Affairs, released today. The articles, by leading global health experts from around the world, show that although these challenges differ dramatically, rising to meet them could save millions of lives.
Health Affairs will highlight the issue’s [...]

The November/December 2009 edition of Health Affairs focuses on key global health challenges, including tackling so-called “neglected diseases” such as trachoma, the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide.  Key lawmakers, leading health policy experts, including former NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D.; and industry officials have been invited to discuss the appropriate strategies and policies for [...]

In a recent Health Affairs Web Exclusive, researchers document for the first time that trade rules reduce access to generic drugs in a low-income country. Using recent Ministry of Health data, they report that in Guatemala, some generics have been withdrawn from the market while others have been denied entry altogether due to intellectual property [...]

Global health issues, especially those affecting the world’s poor, rarely gain anywhere near the attention that the U.S. public and policymakers give to domestic concerns.  However, in one small corner of the current health reform discussion, there is a golden opportunity not only to reduce U.S. health care costs but also to improve the health [...]

Eliminating polio everywhere will require global cooperation on several fronts, including lowering the cost for poor countries to vaccinate with inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), says a leading global health researcher in the July/August Health Affairs thematic issue on global health.
Eradicating the wild polioviruses was supposed to have been achieved by 2000, but the effort to [...]

Getting “the right care to the right patient at the right time” is hard enough in highly developed countries like the United States. In low- and middle-income countries, the challenges are only magnified. Delivering on global health means dealing with a broad array of details that differ depending on the intervention and the location involved. [...]

The imminent inauguration of America’s first African American president, Barack Obama. The sharpest economic contraction since the Great Depression. In nominal terms, the biggest federal budget deficits and highest debt in history.
To this short list of improbabilities, welcome and not, dare we add another — the prospect of health reform? As President Obama prepares to [...]

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 [...]

I visited Cuba last week for an international conference entitled “Medical Education for the 21st Century: Teaching Health for Equity.” Havana is beautiful, dilapidated, and lively. Rickety, vintage Buicks and three-wheeled “coco taxis” ply the streets. Spectacular and decrepit 19th century buildings are being lovingly refurbished by workmen using block and tackle to haul concrete [...]

Health reform ideas and policy proposals for President-elect Barack Obama to consider topped the most-read list on Health Affairs Blog in November. Jeff Goldsmith lays out three options for how health reform might proceed. John Iglehart looks at the policy process an Obama administration might take. And John Goodman’s recent post has generated heated commenting. [...]

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 [...]

The worlds of U.S. and global health lost several important people this month: Allan Rosenfield, Paul Rogers, and Michelle Mayer. Their lives underscore the importance of improving health and health care worldwide — and the many ways there are to leave a legacy behind.
Allan Rosenfield, M.D., died Oct. 12 at age 75 from complications of [...]

India has allocated almost 70 percent of its national HIV budget to prevention, focusing on high-risk sexual behavior and injecting drug use, the main drivers of the nation’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. So report Mariam Claeson and Ashok Alexander in the July/August issue of Health Affairs, a thematic volume on health in China and India.
“There are [...]

Like the United States, China is grappling with a serious obesity epidemic, with nearly 25 percent of its adults considered overweight or obese, according to a study out today in Health Affairs. The rate of overweight adults in the country is predicted to double by 2028 without interventions to stem the growth rate. An increasingly Westernized [...]

India and China have undergone major economic transformations in the past quarter-century – and each now has a middle class that is bigger than the entire U.S. population. Their health care systems have improved but are still facing fundamental challenges. As a result, both countries now stand on the brink of major health reforms. At [...]

The Global Health Council’s 35th Annual International Conference on Global Health, which ran from May 27 to May 31, 2008, featured the theme of Community Health: Delivering, Serving, Engaging, and Leading. The conference attracted more than 2,500 people representing NGOs, businesses, faith-based organizations, academic institutions, multilateral organizations, governments, and students from many different countries. Conference [...]

In interviews with Health Affairs, government ministers in Germany and the Netherlands talk up market-oriented refinements to their universal health insurance systems for the future. But the news from Europe isn’t all happy: an unsettling survey in the United Kingdom finds that some physicians believe that the market will unravel the government-owned and -operated National [...]

In a comparison of 18 countries, the United States ranked at the bottom for number of deaths that could have been prevented by timely and effective health care. Not only were U.S. rates among the worst, the rate of improvement from 1997-98 to 2002-03 was the smallest.

Over the past two months, highly read posts on the Health Affairs Blog looked at President Bush’s veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a new report from the Congressional Budget Office on health spending trends, analysis of the number of uninsured Americans, and discussion of health reform solutions. Posts with a global [...]