Last week I shared a report I wrote at Acumen that described regional variation in spending, utilization and quality for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. Based on our work, an Institute of Medicine committee (lead by Joseph P. Newhouse, Alan Garber, and Robin P. Graham) reached the following conclusions in their newly released report: Health care [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Public Policy' Category
What does a NICE health economist do?
What role do health economists at the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) play and how do they conduct their cost effectiveness analyses for new treatments? I answer this question today based on NICE’s own documents. According to their guidelines manual, the role of the health economist in clinical guideline development is to: [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Theory vs. Reality: End of Life Care
Charles Ornstein is a well-regarded health journalist who has written extensively about end-of-life care. Then his mother became sick. How did his preconceptions about end-of-life care change (if at all) as a result of his experience. An excerpt from the full article is below. I’ve always thought that the high cost of end-of-life care is [...]
Read the rest of this entry »2013 Republican Response: A Healthcare Review
Earlier this week, I posted on the President’s State of the Union address. Now its time to discuss the Republican Response. The main critic offered by Senator Marco Rubio is how Obamacare is increasing health care costs, shifting these costs to employers, and slowing down employment growth and the growth of employer-provided insurance. And because [...]
Read the rest of this entry »2013 State of the Union: A Healthcare Review
What did the President’s speech say about health care? Today I give a review. On Medicare, I’m prepared to enact reforms that will achieve the same amount of health care savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission. What does Simpson-Bowles propose? Here is a list: [...]
Read the rest of this entry »How will your healthcare change if Paul Ryan is the Vice President?
To answer this question the best place to look is Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. The proposal would convert Medicare and Medicaid into voucher-based programs. Individuals and families not covered by either of these programs would receive assistance through a refundable tax credit based on the individual’s income. You can find more information on Mr. Ryan’s [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Red de Protección Social: CCTs in Nicaragua
Oportunidades (formlerly known as Progresa) is a well known initiative in Mexico that provides cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutritional support. The program started in 1997 as a program known as Progresa; Oportunidades in its current form began in in 2002. Oportunidades, however, is not the [...]
Read the rest of this entry »HEALTH REFORM UPHELD
Today the Supreme Court upheld the large majority of Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Health Reform, ObamaCare, ACA) including the individual mandate. Why was the individual mandate allowed to remain in the law? According to Justice Ginsburg and others, it is a form of a tax. “Justice Ginsburg makes clear that the vote is 5-4 on [...]
Read the rest of this entry »International Approaches to Comparative Effectiveness Research
Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) aims to determine whether a drug or medical procedure’s are more cost-effective than alternative treatments and/or none at all. Although the U.S. is not known as a leader in CER research (in part because public health insurance bodies such as Medicare do not take CER evidence into account when making coverage [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Americans’ Opinions of the U.S. Healthcare System: March 2012
On the verge of the Supreme Court’s momentous decision regarding health care care reform, it is important to take a minute to examine what most Americans think. A recent poll finds mostly what we already knew: people like their health insurance, but don’t like ObamaCare. Surprisingly, most people (65%) favor changing Medicare to a voucher-based [...]
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