September 3, 2008
The National Institute for Health Care Management has issued two readable and extremely useful papers on the uninsured. The first NIHCM paper, released in August 2006, is a primer on the alternative ways the uninsured are measured. Most newspapers stories on the uninsured cite the measure put out by the Census Bureau every August, which...
September 3, 2008
It shouldn’t be surprising that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s pick to be his running mate, has built her reputation more on natural resource issues than health care. She’s from Alaska, after all. But Gov. Palin hasn’t been completely silent on health policy either. In February, she...
August 29, 2008
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), Congress’ scorekeeping agency for tax legislation, issued a useful summary of the current law tax treatment of health insurance last month. JCT produced the summary in anticipation of a hearing called by the Senate Finance Committee on July 31st. JCT estimates that the exclusion of...
August 28, 2008
On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released new data on incomes, poverty status, and health insurance coverage rates for 2007. As has been widely reported (see here and here), the most noteworthy change was a surprising drop in the number of uninsured Americans, from 47 million in 2006 to 45.7 million in 2007. Of course, many analysts have...
August 28, 2008
Devon Herrick of the National Center for Policy Analysis has written an interesting policy brief on the uninsured data, available here. One of the points he makes is that the percentage of the population lacking coverage has actually fallen compared to a decade ago, which would probably surprise most Americans, given the way the media...
August 27, 2008
Former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle is scheduled to speak today at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, no doubt in recognition of his early and vocal support for the presidential candidacy of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. In recent months, Daschle has let it be known that he is interested in more than just helping the...
August 22, 2008
Health care in the United States has many flaws. Insurance coverage is too unstable, and the quality of care provided is all too often of low quality and insensitive to the needs of the patient. But that does not mean we need to start from scratch. Most Americans, especially those working for larger employers, still...
August 11, 2008
Too often, discussions of health care reform center on vague assumptions about who the uninsured are, which leads to distorted policy solutions. Many people counted among the uninsured ranks are recent immigrants, as documented in this Employee Benefits Research Institute study. Also, a large percentage of the uninsured are young adults,...
July 31, 2008
In June, the President’s Council on Bioethics held a meeting in Chicago to explore questions related to reform of American health care provision. I was asked to present the case for a tax-based reform approach, which I took to mean a reform plan built on consumer choice and market competition. It was a lively discussion which went...
July 28, 2008
Last week, the New York Times had a piece on the latest policy fad in health care: the “medical home” — “a base where doctors, staff and patients pull together as one big health-care family. Or at least that is the ideal.” It may not be a bad idea. The article reports on an effort in Philadelphia to pay...