In May 2007, Indiana enacted comprehensive health reform in the form of the Indiana Check-Up Plan and its centerpiece, the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP). After intense negotiations, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services granted Indiana the 1115b waiver required for the plan to go into effect in December 2007, and within three months over […]

Full implementation of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit contributed to an 18.7 percent increase in Medicare spending in 2006, the fastest rate of growth since 1981 and double the rise in 2005, the federal government reported today. In 2006, Medicare spending rose to $401.3 billion, up from $338.0 billion a year earlier, says the […]

Editor’s Note: Lammot du Pont, and Helen Pfister of Manatt Health Solutions are also coauthors of this post. The post is an edited version of a longer article written with guidance and support from the California HealthCare Foundation; the Community Clinics Initiative, a project of Tides and the California Endowment; the Colorado Health Foundation; and the RCHN Community Health Foundation.
As the health care industry […]

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Peter Orszag today continued his assault on the elephant in health policy’s living room, the 2.1 percent “excess cost growth” by which the nation’s total health spending growth has exceeded the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) since 1975. At a reporters’ briefing sponsored by Health Affairs, Orszag unveiled a […]

People who live in the New England and Mideast regions of the United States spend significantly more on health care than those who live elsewhere in the nation, the federal government reported Tuesday in a Health Affairs Web Exclusive. Nine northeastern states (MA, ME, NY, CT, DE, RI, VT, WV, PA) and Alaska spent 20 percent […]

A new study [2 weeks free access] in Health Affairs today shows that pay-for-performance (P4P) can work in a Medicaid managed care setting, but only if plans place enough dollars at stake and communicate well with providers. Suzanne Felt-Lisk and colleagues from Mathematica Policy Research evaluated a P4P demonstration of five Medicaid managed care plans […]

One of the hallmarks of SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) has been state flexibility and innovation. Many advocates for children did not warmly embrace the original legislation creating SCHIP. Some Democrats, such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), feared that creating an insurance program that was not an entitlement and not tied to federal […]

Today a bipartisan group of governors at the National Governors Association meeting here in Washington sent a letter to Congress asking for immediate action on SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) which is already running at a deficit in some states. The governors ask for $765 million in supplemental funding. Also of concern to states is the president’s […]

Community rating, once the hallmark of health insurance in the United States, has been in accelerated decline since the 1980s. For the past few years, a fundamentally opposite notion of insurance, that of individual health savings accounts has been all the rage. The concept of consumer-driven health care–making consumers more aware of the actual costs […]

A “new season” of health reform was endorsed by Senators, state leaders, and Hill staff on both sides of the aisle at the National Health Policy Conference here in DC. [Update: Webcasts are now available.] This morning Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, predicted “the season of incremental change is coming […]

President Bush’s fiscal year 2008 budget will propose cutting Medicare and Medicaid by $70 billion over five years, Robert Pear reports in the New York Times. The administration is expected to propose freezing Medicare payments to home health agencies and reducing payment updates for hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers. The Bush budget also assumes […]