Editor’s Note: Tim Jost wrote 3 posts analyzing the House health reform bill HR 3962. The first looks at financing reforms, the second post delves into the public option, health insurance exchanges, and more.
In this final post, I will explore the remaining 1600 pages of HR 3962.  Although these provisions have received less attention (except [...]

Editor’s Note: In addition to Arthur Garson (photo and bio available above), coauthors of this post include Margaret Whitehead, Tracy Buni, Catherine Sommers, and Karen Rheuban.
Given current trends, access to health care will worsen considerably in the next 15 years. The first wave of baby boomers is now turning 65, and health care utilization for this [...]

Federal support for graduate medical education (GME) training positions has been capped for more than a decade and it is no secret that the country’s teaching hospitals are restive. They want “more cap.” A number of bills have been introduced in the House and Senate proposing an increase in the Medicare funded GME cap by [...]

A new study published today in Health Affairs finds that the decade-long nurse shortage is easing, or even ending, partly as a result of the continuing recession. Study author Peter Buerhaus of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing and colleagues found that older nurses are delaying retirement or returning to the workforce and part-time nurses [...]

Join us for a discussion, moderated by Susan Dentzer of Health Affairs, examining the impact of the nursing workforce on health care delivery, access and quality. This event, on Friday June 12 from 9 a.m. to noon at the Union Station Columbus Club in Washington DC, also marks the publication of several papers in Health [...]

The train has left the station. Everyone is on board: health policy leaders both public, like the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and private, like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and the Commonwealth Fund; influential medical societies like the American College of Physicians and the American College [...]

Given the strong emphasis on medical specialization and the beleaguered state of primary care, Democratic and Republican policymakers and a host of private-sector interests are promoting the resurrection of the generalist doctor in the physician workforce. But most graduating medical students who matched to residency positions this year have not yet gotten the message. And [...]

Editor’s Note: There is widespread agreement that the nation’s primary care infrastructure is woefully inadequate. For example, at the Senate hearing on his nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, Sen. Tom Daschle spoke of health care as a pyramid, with primary care at the bottom and specialized care at the top. He [...]

Ever since an 18-year-old New York woman died tragically in 1984 under the care of medical residents who—in the view of her family—were overworked and undersupervised, the subject of the duty hours of physician trainees has simmered in the academic medical community and, on occasion, among public policymakers. Now, as the consequence of a new [...]

Over the summer, Health Affairs Blog posts on the Medicare Advantage debate in Congress claimed top spots on the most-read list for July and August. A late August post by Henry Aaron looked at how Obama and McCain would cover the uninsured. Another late August post by Len Nichols on calculating the cost of covering [...]

Government policymakers and private-sector stakeholders have been crafting the nation’s health care workforce for years without answering definitively a question that lies at the heart of the matter: should policymaking follow the values of many Americans and rely on market-based solutions, or — in this instance — does more prescriptive government regulation make more sense? [...]