HR 3962, the Affordable Health Care for Americans Act, hit the House floor with a thud Thursday morning at 1990 pages, almost double the size of the bill we last saw before the Energy and Commerce hearings at the end of July.  The bill incorporates, of course, amendments from the House jurisdictional committees, but also [...]

Narrative Matters recently brought together 80 writers, journalists, and academics to celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of Narrative Matters.  There was much to celebrate: over 150 Narratives published in Health Affairs that covered a spectrum of human stories set in the increasingly institutionalized health care system.  We came to celebrate the power of stories and storytelling in the [...]

In recent days, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have taken up the argument that the Democratic health reform bills represent a “government takeover” of the health care system.  These claims misrepresent the substantive content of the bills, since the approach of the main committee bills is to extend employer-sponsored, private insurance.  But this rhetorical exaggeration [...]

On the heels of the President’s speech on health care reform, the Census Bureau released to little fanfare new estimates of health insurance coverage from the Current Population Survey (CPS).   Between 2007 and 2008, the number of individuals without health insurance rose from 45.7 million to 46.3 million, increasing the ranks of the uninsured by [...]

Widely cited estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau likely overstate the number of uninsured people and understate the number of people with Medicaid coverage because of an inability of people to recall their insurance status accurately from the previous year, according to a study published yesterday on the Health Affairs Web site.
The CPS, administered in February, [...]

Editor’s Note: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has been deprived of needed resources and authority by Congresses and Presidents of both parties, former CMS acting director Kerry Weems said in a recent Health Affairs interview with the journal’s founding editor, John Iglehart. To follow up on this interview, the Health Affairs Blog convened [...]

Editor’s Note: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has been deprived of needed resources and authority by Congresses and Presidents of both parties, former CMS acting director Kerry Weems said in a recent Health Affairs interview with the journal’s founding editor, John Iglehart. To follow up on this interview, the Health Affairs Blog convened [...]

For those of us who have made Medicaid the focus of our work, it never ceases to amaze us as we watch the great health care debate unfold how frequently we find ourselves saying, “Medicaid can do that.” Or, even more often, “Medicaid is doing that.”
These are heady times for big concepts for transforming health [...]

While the most visible national health reform fight at the moment focuses on a public plan option for people covered through health insurance exchanges (or gateways), a quieter debate is brewing over whether coverage for low-income people should be achieved through Medicaid expansions or subsidies to purchase insurance through an exchange. For example, the Senate [...]

Editor’s Note: *** Today, Health Affairs released the newest 10-year national health spending projections by researchers from the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Separately, Health Affairs also released a second paper providing annual estimates by health spending by medical condition.
In the post below, Rudy Penner of the Urban Institute says [...]

Covering low-income people through public programs such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, rather than through private health insurance, results in lower per-person medical spending and considerably lower out-of-pocket expenses for consumers. That’s the conclusion of a new study published today on the Health Affairs Web site.

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 [...]