The Center for Studying Health System Change has issued a comprehensive report on the progress of the Massachusetts health reform plan.Anyone interested in the plan's progress will find this must reading.From their overview:As Massachusetts' landmark effort to reach nearly universal health coverage continues, affordability of coverage remains a key concern for individuals and small
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Health Wonk Review for July 26, 2007
This time it's my turn to host Health Wonk Review, a compendium of some of the best health care policy and market posts from the health care blog world.Joe Paduda seemingly gave up his extra summer time researching the arguments against universal coverage. Joe digs into the logical, philosophical, and political issues; there's also a great summary. With all the recent attention to other nation's
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Romney Condemns Obama's Health Plan--But Obama's Plan is a Clone of the Massachusetts Plan Romney Signed!
Mitt Romney criticized Barack Obama's health care proposal over the weekend in New Hampshire. According to The Baltimore Sun, Romney said, "Barack Obama said we're going to have the government take over health care. He at least had the integrity to say he wants to raise your taxes." He added, "The right answer is not a government takeover, it's not socialized medicine. It's not Hillarycare."
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Massachusetts Expected to Further Backpedal on its Individual Mandate
The Boston Globe is reporting that the Massachusetts legislature "will probably make changes" to the new health care law that could well include capping what a person has to pay for health insurance at 10% before the individual mandate law can be enforced.Presumably, this would mean a family with a household income of $50,000 per year would have to pay no more than $5,000. I fear that is still
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New York AG Objects to Insurer's Method for Ranking Doctors by Cost and Quality--Just What We Need in Health Metrics--Lawyers
At the core of any market-based ability to control costs--pay-for-performance or consumer-driven care--is the notion that patients and payers have information available to them on a health care provider's cost and quality results.Too often the health plan rhetoric--or marketing brochures--have got out ahead of anyone's real ability to measure cost and quality both accurately and in a way that is
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Bush Reaffirms Veto Threat Over SCHIP Despite Strong Republican Support for Bipartisan Compromise—What’s Really Going On Here?
The most exasperated person in Washington has to be Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). The Ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee has worked out a bipartisan compromise with his good friend Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) to continue the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) past its September 30 expiration date.The plan currently covers 6.6 million low income kids and would cover
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"Cavalcade of Risk" is Up Over At "Sentinel Effect"
Richard Eskow has more than two dozen carefully selected posts from the world of insurance blogs up over at his "Sentinel Effect."Richard has put a lot of time into giving us a wide array of good work.
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"Government Subsidies That halve Premiums Would Cut Number of Uninsured by 3%"--No Surprise There But it Was the Wrong Question
That's the headline on a story regarding a Rand study that says giving people subsidies won't do much to decrease the number of those uninsured.But here's the problem with that study: Paying for half the cost of health insurance that averages more than $11,000 for a family in the U.S. still makes health insurance prohibitively expensive for all but the well off.As I posted yesterday, voluntary
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California Health Care Reform—An Individual Mandate is Nowhere Near as Important as Affordable Health Insurance
California is entering the final weeks of a major effort to reform the state’s health insurance system.Good for them and in particular good for Governor Schwarzenegger who is willing to tackle this most prickly of domestic policy issues!The Governor and the legislature will need to get a deal done by the end of September if it is going to happen in this session—or maybe for a long time to come.As
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President Bush is Not Backing Down on His SCHIP Veto Threat
The President is sticking to his guns over his threatened veto of the Senate Finance Committee bipartisan deal to reauthorize and expand the State Children's Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP) at a cost of $35 billion. The deal would expand S-CHIP and pay for it with a big 61 cent cigarette tax--taking the federal per pack tax to $1.A White House spokesman said on Saturday that his advisers "will
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