By JOHN GOODMAN Have you ever wondered how anyone could possibly think that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) would lead to less health care spending? Consider that the act is expected to (a) insure more than half...

This is a summary of the HIT Trends Report for August 2010. You can get the current issue or subscribe here Large insurers make HIT commitments. This month’s trends are dominated by national health plans revealing more about their HIT...

By Bianca Grogan Cliquez pour la vidéo en français Panelists include Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant, Miguel Cabrer from Medting, Tim Ringrose from Doctors.net.uk, David Payne from the British Medical Journal, doc2doc, Thomas Skoglund from Neurosurgic, and Pierre-Emmanuel Aubert from Santé...

By Bianca Grogan Pieter Vos, from the Council for Public Health and Health Care, gave a keynote address on stage at the Health 2.0 Europe Conference, April 6-7, 2010, in Paris, France. The Council for Public Health and Health Care...

By MERRILL GOOZNER Journalist-turned-stock-analyst Ramsey Baghdadi of Concept Capital, who formerly wrote for the RPM Report, tells TheStreet.com that Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committee recommendations are down to 52 percent "yes" votes this year, "the worst year since 2007."...

At the beginning of this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched an initiative called Connecting Kids to Coverage, designed to identify (and subsequently enroll) the nearly five million uninsured children thought to be eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). In the past it had been difficult [...]

Workers on average are paying nearly $4,000 this year toward the cost of family health coverage — an increase of 14 percent, or $482, above what they paid last year, according to the benchmark 2010 Employer Health Benefits Survey released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET). Selected [...]

Henry Stern at InsureBlog hosts the latest edition of the Health Wonk Review. As always, the Review highlights many interesting posts. Among them: “New Ideas In Medicare Financing,” a Health Affairs Blog post by Michael O’Grady and Jennifer Young. Copyright © 2010 Health Affairs Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. All material published [...]

By DAVID C. KIBBE & BRIAN KLEPPER Finally, we have a Final Rule on the Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive programs. The rules and criteria are simpler and more flexible, and the measures easier to compute. But they are still...

By KENT BOTTLES, MD I am frankly surprised by the number of comments, emails, and telephone calls I have received about my doctor report card blog post. Some were charged with emotion and even anger. The number and tone of...

By MICHAEL MILLENSON The humble tonsillectomy has been at the center of controversies over practice variation, inappropriate surgery and avoidable harm for decades; indeed, well before the terms to describe those problems were formally articulated. Now, thanks to the recently...

By Bianca Grogan Cliquez pour la vidéo en français

The Medicaid program is facing major new challenges.  The new health care law puts both significant new responsibilities and financial burdens on the program.  At the same time, Medicaid, as one of the three major federal entitlement programs, is a top priority for policy makers trying to address the federal government’s staggering budget deficits.  Unfortunately, [...]

By PAUL LEVY The talk around the country among health insurance companies is that their insurance business is dying. What is happening? First, the consolidations in other industries, resulting in large, multistate corporations, already mean that many companies self insure...

By Matthew Holt Next week there’s post-Labor day health care fun in San Diego. The 2nd mHealth Networking Conference is Sept 8-9 and Healthcamp San Diego is the day before (Sept 6). Both are run by good health care friends—Peter...

The September 2010 issue of Health Affairs is devoted to two issues that arguably were insufficiently addressed by the Affordable Care Act:  medical liability and patient safety; and the growing nonemergency use of the nation’s hospital emergency rooms. The issue contains new estimates of how much medical liability costs the health care system overall; of [...]

By DAVID DRANOVE Over the next few years, the U.S. healthcare system will be in the hands of academics from Cambridge, Massachusetts. New CMS Czar Donald Berwick was a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. Joe Newhouse, who has...