Americans need and deserve health information technology (IT). As the chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications Inc. and the only business representative on a federal commission to develop a strategy for health care IT standards, I have spent considerable time over the past several years promoting this technological necessity.  
In addition, Verizon helped found an unprecedented, […]

Just when it looked as if the debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) couldn’t get any more agonizing, some of the same folks who brought us the devastating RAND 55 percent study four years ago are back with the dismal news that children, on average, receive recommended treatment in only 46.5 percent […]

Policy debates about reauthorizing and expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and its related Medicaid programs for kids are about providing access for poor kids to health insurance. School-based health care is about reaching kids where they spend half or more of each weekday. The larger issue in creating high-quality health care accessible […]

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 […]

Elliott Fisher and colleagues in their provocative paper published online December 5 validated an approach to quantifying the clinical and economic performance of physician communities clustered statistically around hospitals. Fisher describes the so-called extended hospital medical staff as “hospital-associated multispecialty group practices” or “virtual organizations.” While some physician markets do indeed function as “communities,” with […]

On Wednesday, Dec. 6, Health Affairs hosted a conference call among the authors of the primary papers in its Dec. 5 Web Exclusive package on hospital-physician relations:
Chris Fleming (communications manager, Health Affairs): You all wrote very interesting papers for our package on hospital-physician relations, and I thought I would start things out by just asking, […]

American Public Health Association executive director Georges Benjamin spoke with Health Affairs deputy editor Parmeeth Atwal at the APHA annual meeting earlier this month in Boston about the meeting’s human rights theme, the association’s “Get Ready” program, and the future direction of public health.
Atwal: I note that in this month’s issue of the American Journal […]

I am pleased to announce that after twenty-five years as a bimonthly print journal and six years in online publishing, Health Affairs has entered the blogosphere as a new means of engaging readers in the health policy debate. The journal is all about an ongoing dialogue on health policy issues of concern to a diverse […]