To round out a week of “most-read” lists (top 10 Health Affairs Blog posts of 2007 and of January-February 2008), we are pleased to announce the most-read Health Affairs journal articles published in 2007. All articles below are free access for 2 weeks—through March 20, 2008.

“Health Spending Projections Through 2016: Modest Changes Obscure Part D’s […]

Comparing health systems, the growth of U.S. health spending, and proposals to fix Medicare physician payment topped the January-February 2008 most-read list for the Health Affairs Blog. Sign up for email or RSS feed alerts to stay on top of new postings. Additional commenting always welcome.

U.S. Worst At Beating Death From Treatable Illness
by Jane Hiebert-White
HEALTH […]

The good people in the Office of the Actuary (OA) at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) take great pains every year to summarize and explain their health spending forecast without spin or exaggeration. The editors of Health Affairs are perennially grateful to them for taking an approach that helps the journal fulfill […]

Editor’s Note: The following post by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) comments on the projections of national health spending from 2007 through 2017, published today by Sean Keehan and his colleagues in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary as a Health Affairs Web Exclusive. 
Although there’s a lot of explosive material in the latest National Health Expenditures forecast, […]

Editor’s Note: The following post by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) comments on the projections of national health spending from 2007 through 2017, published today by Sean Keehan and his colleagues at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary as a Health Affairs Web Exclusive.
The projection that health care spending will reach […]

Editor’s Note: In the Jan/Feb issue of Health Affairs, Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, offered a Perspective on the report on national health spending for 2006 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary. Ginsburg’s article, which warned, “Don’t Break Out The Champagne” in celebration of slower health spending growth, prompted a response on the Health Affairs Blog by […]

Having reviewed the latest report on national health spending in 2006 (Health Affairs, Jan/Feb 2008) from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Paul Ginsburg’s commentary (“Don’t Break out the Champagne: Continued Slowing of Health Spending Growth Unlikely to Last”), I want to offer a dissenting view. Though I do not have the […]

Two trillion dollars is a lot of money. So when Health Affairs published earlier this week an official estimate of health spending in 2006 that exceeded that amount, it was big news. Media outlets all over the planet picked it up. The journal tallied a record number of pageviews for a single day – more than […]

Bob Laszewski hosts a terrific Health Wonk Review today on his blog, Health Care Marketplace and Policy Review. Bob’s edition of this biweekly round-up of the best of health policy blogging highlights posts analyzing John McCain’s health reform plan, the reform plans of Democratic presidential candidates, health reforms in California, and more. Lots of timely health policy […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

What role should the U.S. government play in confronting global health challenges? What are Congress’s priorities for the reauthorization of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and how much should be invested in research to help stem the AIDS pandemic? How can we protect 150 million people globally from suffering financial catastrophe each […]

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 […]

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 […]

New health spending projections; thoughts on the President’s health plan; and the proliferation of health reform proposals attracted readers this past month on the Health Affairs Blog. Continued comments are always welcome. 
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