Can Health Plans Explain Why They Aren’t Re-Empowering Primary Care?

The health care crisis can be traced in part to the marginalization of primary care

An Impending Hanging

Will Health 2.0 be compromised by the economic downturn? Nothing focuses the mind like an impending hanging. — Samuel Johnson I’ve been preparing for tomorrow’s 3rd Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where I’ll join my pals Matthew, Indu Subaiya, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and Michael Millenson amid a Who’s-Who cast of health industry luminaries. I spent […]

Chastened and More Sober, Harry and Louise Return

New coalition urges health care reform with a clever ad, but, not surprisingly, they all understand reform differentlyYesterday Ron Pollack of Families USA led a call with bloggers – unfortunately, I couldn’t be on it – to discuss a new health care reform campaign sponsored by 5 prominent organizations: the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action […]

Is Meaningful Health Care (Or Any Other Kind Of) Reform Possible?

Congress’ money-for-policy system will prevent health care reform Those who wait, ever hopefully, for real health reform might want to take a deep breath and take stock of a few realities. First, think about the fact that when the Democrats retook Congress, they tweaked but did not fundamentally change the lobbying rules that trade money […]

More On Physician Reimbursement, CMS, and the AMA’s RVS Update Committee (RUC)

An opinion on how the sole-source relationship between CMS and the AMA’s RUC threatens Medicare’s pilot on medical homes (Note: At Health Care Renewal, Dr. Roy Poses, a Clinical Associate Professor at Brown University’s School of Medicine, writes a consistently excellent blog on health care financial conflict . Both he and I have written extensively […]

The State of Employer-Sponsored Coverage

Only half of workers have health coverage through their employers. Is this model feasible into the future?A detailed new study from the Economics Policy Institute confirms what many of us suspect but haven’t had the data to easily nail down. This weightily-titled report by Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz – A Decade of Decline: The […]

‘Consumers Checkbook’: An Open Response To HHS Secretary Leavitt

HHS says that it wants transparency, but its actions speak differently A few months ago, the two of us (Brian Klepper, top photo, Michael Millenson, bottom photo) – both long-time advocates for transparency and accountability – posted separate comments on Secretary Mike Leavitt’s blog. Brian asked Secretary Leavitt to square his support of "Chartered Value Exchanges” with […]

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