Like a recurring illness, stalemate looms again over the prospects for settling the issue of payment levels to private plans in Medicare, which now exceed the average per beneficiary cost of traditional fee-for-service Medicare by 13 percent, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. MedPAC recommends eliminating the differential, which funds extra benefits for private-plan […]

The Health Wonk Review, a biweekly round-up of the best of health policy blogging, is hosted today by Jon Coppelman at Worker’s Comp Insider. Topics range from Medicare Advantage plans to single-payer systems; pharmaceutical industry to AIDS in Africa. Worker’s Comp Insider is a five-year-old blog (very senior in blogosphere terms!) that looks at consumer […]

For your Leap Day reading pleasure, we offer here the list of Top 10 most-read Health Affairs Blog Posts of 2007. Next up—Top 10 for January-February 2008. Additional commenting always welcome.

INSURANCE: A Closer Look At HSAs
by Uwe Reinhardt
REFORM: Musings On SiCKO, July 4th, and Visions of America
by Sarah Dine
HEALTH REFORM: Redefining Health Care
by Michael E. […]

Editor’s Note: Economists Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation and Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution have different worldviews when it comes to how best to allocate scarce health care resources, but on one subject they have come to strongly agree: a way to end the political impasse in Washington [free access article] and make […]

Congress is on the verge of passing legislation mandating that health plans cover mental health (MH) and substance abuse treatment to the same extent that they cover other medical and surgical treatment. In a study published December 18 on the Health Affairs Web site, researchers say that passage of either the Senate or House version of this […]

Perhaps the signal event in federal health policy for 2007 is the failure to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). On Wednesday, December 13, President Bush vetoed the second version of the SCHIP reauthorization.

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 […]

Sometimes the most interesting discussion on a blog goes on under the radar, in comments or other off-the-grid discussion. Chris Fleming’s passing reference to research revisiting the findings of the venerable RAND Health Insurance Experiment sparked a comment by Joseph Newhouse, the Harvard economist who has published repeated analyses of the RAND experiment throughout the […]

Bob Laszewski of Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review hosts a new edition of Cavalcade of Risk today. This round-up of recent blog posts on risk and its management is published every two weeks.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt has recently launched a blog. Today he offers the administration’s view on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) reauthorization bill, which President Bush recently vetoed. 
Sec. Leavitt says that he writes his own posts. So far he’s blogging about once a week. Here’s an excerpt from today’s […]

The most-read post of September on the Health Affairs Blog was by Linda Aiken on Pennsylvania’s new legislation which focuses on tapping nurses and other health professionals to address health reform issues. Aiken, the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, also has the most-read blog post for […]

Expanding coverage to the forty-seven million Americans who now lack health insurance could greatly improve care for people who already are protected, according to a new study in the September-October issue of Health Affairs. Economists Mark Pauly of Wharton and José Pagán of the University of Texas-Pan American found that insured adults who live in communities […]

Now that it’s September and Congress is back in session, it’s time to prepare for the September policy showdown on reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Last month Health Affairs Blog invited policy experts with wide-ranging views to set out the hot-button issues–such as the tobacco tax funding mechanism–and explain the politics. These posts […]

On the second anniversary of the disastrous Hurricane Katrina, it is fitting to look at issues of risk and preparedness. Today, Health Affairs Blog is hosting the blog carnival “Cavalcade Of Risk” which was started by Hank Stern of InsureBlog.
Preparing For Disaster
In a report in this morning’s St. Augustine Record, Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier […]

This morning the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the number of uninsured Americans jumped to 47 million in 2006, up from 44.8 million in 2005. In percentage terms, there were 15.8 percent of Americans without insurance in 2006, up from 15.3 percent in 2005. This also represents the sixth year in a row that the […]

In a wistful and wise editorial in the August 3 Washington Post, David Broder mourned what the SCHIP debate had become–an ugly polarizing event.
Many commentators have wondered how a bipartisan program passed during the waning years of the Clinton administration under a Republican-dominated Congress descended into an ugly scrimmage beset by cries of socialized medicine, […]

Richard Eskow of the blog The Sentinel Effect hosts today’s Cavalcade Of Risk. This blog carnival is a round-up of insurance-related blogposts. On the health care side of insurance, there are posts on such topics as universal coverage, electronic health IT records, insurance premium pricing, and more.

The Senate Finance Committee mark-up of the SCHIP reauthorization bill features a compromise increase of $35 billion for five years. The Bush administration requested a $5 billion increase, and the Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) had proposed a $50 billion increase in March. In its barest outlines, the bill recalls the initial SCHIP (State Children’s Health […]

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 […]

While presidential candidates are expected to sound firm and decisive on the big issues, a more appropriate posture in the case of health care might be to admit that the current environment is too unsettled to predict what the best policies might be 18 months from now.
The candidates might take a hint from the glaring […]