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 […]

Editor’s Note: This post continues the conversation in the Health Affairs Blog roundtable on the unsuccessful health reform effort in California. Below, Lucien Wulsin responds to the ideas expressed in the first round of California posts, which appeared last Wednesday and Thursday. You can also read and comment on response posts appearing today from Rick […]

Editor’s Note: This post continues the conversation in the Health Affairs Blog roundtable on the unsuccessful health reform effort in California. Below, Patricia Lynch responds to the ideas expressed in the first round of California posts, which appeared last Wednesday and Thursday. You can also read and comment on response posts appearing today from Rick Curtis […]

Editor’s Note: This post continues the conversation in the Health Affairs Blog roundtable on the unsuccessful health reform effort in California. Below, Ed Neuschler and Rick Curtis respond to the ideas expressed in the first round of California posts, which appeared last Wednesday and Thursday. You can also read and comment on response posts appearing […]

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in a Health Affairs Blog roundtable on the unsuccessful health care reform effort in California. Rick Curtis and Ed Neuschler, Patricia Lynch, and Rick Kronick are also participating in the roundtable. Follow-up comments from Curtis and Neuschler, Lynch, and Wulsin are posted.
Nearly 20 percent of Californians under age sixty-five […]

Editor’s Note: This is the third post in a Health Affairs Blog roundtable on the unsuccessful health care reform effort in California. Rick Curtis and Ed Neuschler, Patricia Lynch, and Lucien Wulsin are also participating in the roundtable. Follow-up comments from Curtis and Neuschler, Lynch, and Wulsin are posted.
A lot of heat, if very little […]

Editor’s Note: This is the second post in a Health Affairs Blog roundtable on the unsuccessful health care reform effort California. Rick Curtis and Ed Neuschler, Lucien Wulsin, and Rick Kronick are also participating in the roundtable. Follow-up comments from Curtis and Neuschler, Wulsin, and Lynch are posted.
Kaiser Permanente views the failure to put the health reform legislation developed by Gov. […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first post in a Health Affairs Blog roundtable on the unsuccessful health care reform effort in California. Patricia Lynch, Lucien Wulsin, and Rick Kronick are also participating in the roundtable. Follow-up comments from Curtis and Neuschler, Lynch, and Wulsin are posted.
Although stymied by economic woes and governance constraints unique to California, the […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s the morning after President Bush’s veto of the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). How did a program that started out with such bipartisan support become the health policy wonk equivalent of all-out war? Today’s Health Wonk Review takes a look across the blogosphere for some health policy soul-searching.
Politico blogger Ben […]

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 […]

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 […]

Massachusetts took our breath away with the elegant political balance of its reform solution — whether the state’s universal coverage plan turns out to be implementable or not. California, on the other hand, leaves us scratching our heads: What is going on out there? 
Ultimately, it is a state that governs by referendum, and the fate […]

Many of Washington policymakers and health policy experts are returning from August vacations to find that the month was not as quiet as expected. On Friday evening, August 17th, the Administration issued a major new directive on children’s health coverage that effectively eliminates SCHIP for children above 250 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), […]

While the last two weeks in August used to be a rather somnolent period in Washington, it seems like the participants in the SCHIP debate missed the vacation memo. The events of those weeks, the new CMS guidance on current SCHIP implementation and the release of the Census Bureau Report on Income, Poverty, and Health […]

On July 20, 2007 Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell signed into law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing several bills included in his comprehensive health reform plan, “Prescription for Pennsylvania.” Rendell’s plan is noteworthy among recent state health reform initiatives in focusing not just on covering the 7 percent of Pennsylvanians who are uninsured, […]

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 […]

The current SCHIP debate is about more than just children’s health coverage. Behind the rhetoric from both sides lies the struggle to define the future of health care in America. One side in the debate is using SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) reauthorization to incrementally expand the role of government in the health care […]

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, […]