Health Policy Matters Newsletter

Follow the Money

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All roads to new legislation in Washington run through the Congressional Budget Office, and the CBO yesterday offered health policy makers a menu of 115 choices of reform initiatives, with price tags attached. It's like a shopping list for policy makers, who, using our money, will mix and match ideas and offer new ones of their own.

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Health Policy Pulse

Dear President-Elect: Please Put Patients First

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An open letter to President-elect Obama and Secretary-designate Daschle in response to the incoming administration's requests for comments on health reform.

What's New

Indiana’s free-market idea to help the uninsured get health coverage

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has used free-market thinking and a healthy dose of individual responsibility to create an innovative program to help uninsured people get health insurance. The Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) passed the legislature with bi-partisan support last year, and people already are enrolling in the new program. It has funding to cover 130,000 people, and tens of thousands of people already are enrolled.

Putting a Dollar Sign on Patients' Lives

As Americans reflect on their blessings this Thanksgiving, will they count the U.S. health care system among them? Politicians, the media and probably most people would say no. But if we alter the question, directing it toward the individual and away from the system, the answer changes drastically.
A startling majority of Americans - 77 percent - said the quality of their own health care was "excellent" or "good" in a recent study.

Providing Coverage For All Through Private Health Insurance

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The United States is unique in the developed world in that the majority of Americans have private health insurance that they receive through the workplace. This is not the result of a deliberate decision but rather policy that evolved as the unintended consequence of a World War II ruling. Factory owners were competing to lure and keep good workers and wanted to offer health insurance as a benefit, but they needed the government’s assurance that this wouldn’t violate wartime wage and price controls.

Reforming the State Children's Health Insurance Program

Few issues generate more political emotion than the need to provide health insurance for children.  It is much less expensive to cover children than adults, and healthy children have the best chance of becoming healthy adults. But that does not mean the government must provide the insurance. Nonetheless, the new Congress is poised to act on President-elect Obama’s campaign promise to provide universal coverage for children.  With the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) due to expire on March 31, Congress is expected to use renewal of the program as a vehicle to require that all children have health insurance.

Drug Safety: Jurors Shouldn't Be Practicing Medicine

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Jurors aren't physicians. They're regular people. So why would we entrust them with medical decisions best made by clinicians or scientists? It sounds preposterous, but jurors could be given the responsibility for deciding how doctors should practice. That's the scenario one woman is pushing before the Supreme Court. Instead of experts at the Food and Drug Administration having the final say on drug safety, people whose medical training consists of watching ER reruns could wield the power to pull the plug on a drug critical to your health.