Health Affairs

Back in November, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee wrote a remarkably candid essay for a special election issue of the trade journal Modern Healthcare. Since then, the former Arkansas governor’s campaign has morphed from single-digit obscurity to mainstream prominence, and the candor on health care has mostly been scrubbed clean from his Web site. Nonetheless,... Read the rest of this entry »

Does the fact that The Diving Bell and The Butterfly won the Golden Globe award for the best foreign movie tell us anything about French health care? Or does it tell us more about movies about health care, the artistic French vs. “The Ugly American”? For the upcoming Academy Awards, Michael Moore’s health care movie,... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: In the Jan/Feb issue of Health Affairs, Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, offered a Perspective on the report on national health spending for 2006 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary. Ginsburg’s article, which warned, “Don’t Break Out The Champagne” in celebration of slower health spending growth, prompted a response on the Health Affairs Blog by... Read the rest of this entry »

Having reviewed the latest report on national health spending in 2006 (Health Affairs, Jan/Feb 2008) from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Paul Ginsburg’s commentary (“Don’t Break out the Champagne: Continued Slowing of Health Spending Growth Unlikely to Last”), I want to offer a dissenting view. Though I do not have the... Read the rest of this entry »

As patient volumes in hospital emergency departments (EDs) are going up, waiting times to see an ED physician are getting longer, particularly for heart attack patients and those in need of the most immediate attention, according to a study by Harvard Medical School researchers at the Cambridge Health Alliance published today as a Health Affairs... Read the rest of this entry »

Two trillion dollars is a lot of money. So when Health Affairs published earlier this week an official estimate of health spending in 2006 that exceeded that amount, it was big news. Media outlets all over the planet picked it up. The journal tallied a record number of pageviews for a single day – more than... Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Laszewski hosts a terrific Health Wonk Review today on his blog, Health Care Marketplace and Policy Review. Bob’s edition of this biweekly round-up of the best of health policy blogging highlights posts analyzing John McCain’s health reform plan, the reform plans of Democratic presidential candidates, health reforms in California, and more. Lots of timely health policy... Read the rest of this entry »

In a comparison of 18 countries, the United States ranked at the bottom for number of deaths that could have been prevented by timely and effective health care. Not only were U.S. rates among the worst, the rate of improvement from 1997-98 to 2002-03 was the smallest.

Full implementation of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit contributed to an 18.7 percent increase in Medicare spending in 2006, the fastest rate of growth since 1981 and double the rise in 2005, the federal government reported today. In 2006, Medicare spending rose to $401.3 billion, up from $338.0 billion a year earlier, says the... Read the rest of this entry »