UnitedHealth Group officials may have been laying protective cover for themselves when they attributed poor first-quarter earnings to a sagging economy last week. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true, as United said, that business is bad because the company’s products are getting too expensive for a growing number of workers and companies. Coming within […]

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, […]

In a lively 45-minute session near the end of a long day, representatives from eight leading presidential candidates (Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, McCain, Obama, Richardson, and Romney), along with Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, gathered on stage in front of more than 500 participants at Health Affairs’ 25th anniversary health policy summit, to […]

Editor’s Note: Why have so few provider groups undertaken the self-analysis that the Virginia Mason Medical Center (VMMC) entered into through its use of the famed Toyota Production System, even before Aetna and large employers began to push VMMC to cut costs? This is just one question posed by James C. Robinson, Berkeley economist and […]

Health coverage is becoming less affordable for Californians in both the small-group and individual insurance markets, but affordability problems are showing up in very different ways in the two markets, Jon Gabel of NORC and coauthors report in a paper published June 14 on the Health Affairs Web site (free access through June 27).
The study […]

What happens when a government agency in charge of assessing the effectiveness of medical interventions crunches numbers and tells pharmaceutical companies their drugs are just too expensive? Sometimes, the government gets a better deal.
Twice last week, the much-feared National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England and Wales was a factor in drug […]

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 […]

Uninsured patients are billed on average 2.5 times more than insured patients and 3 times more than Medicare patients for hospital care, according to a new study published in Health Affairs. Professor Gerard F. Anderson of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health writes: “Fifty years ago the poor and uninsured were often charged […]

In our Health Affairs article, we examined the impact on cost-sharing of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) coupled with high deductible (HD) health plans. We showed that people facing high marginal tax rates who chose HD plans typical of those offered would face reduced cost-sharing and would likely to increase, rather than decrease, their health care […]

A study [free access for two weeks] published today on the Health Affairs Web site provides the first empirical evidence concerning how often physicians are stretching federal and state laws — and perhaps breaking them — by referring patients to imaging providers with whom they have a financial relationship.
“Laws enacted during the early 1990s to […]

Do high-deductible health insurance policies, coupled with tax preferred Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) championed by the Bush Administration and a number of health policy analysts, actually reduce rather than increase cost sharing for many groups? Dahlia K. Remler and Sherry A. Glied made this case in a Health Affairs paper which was quickly picked up […]

Old hands in Washington are getting a here-we-go-again feeling about health care these days. Candidates and polls are pushing reform toward the top of the nation’s agenda. Many states are on the march. Realism occasionally rears its head in the right places: Controlling cost growth seems to be recognized increasingly as a priority of the […]

The sentiment “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has a strong foothold in the United States, as does the thought that it takes a whole lot to prove that something’s “broke.” Nonetheless, Americans are increasingly declaring that health insurance in this country is very badly broken. The reality, many say, is that insurance coverage […]

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 […]

Clayton Christensen is one of America’s most influential business thinkers and writers. A professor at Harvard Business School, Christensen is perhaps best known for his writings on disruptive innovation in such books as The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. In an interview I conducted with Christensen, he argues that the answer for more affordable […]

Beltway sages expect the health agenda for the 110th Congress to be crowded, especially in comparison with other recent sessions, and can identify without great difficulty a number of issues that are likely to loom large come January. SCHIP reauthorization and Medicare’s physician payment dilemma are on most pundits’ short list of inevitable preoccupations. The […]