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Pulling it Together: Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks
Way back in the eighties when I was Human Services Commissioner in New Jersey, I established something called the Garden State Health Plan (GSHP). It was the first — and I think the only — federally qualified state-run HMO for Medicaid beneficiaries. One goal of the GSHP was to reallocate…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: Last Week’s Health Reform “Shocker”
Last week we learned that health reform could cost the federal government at least a trillion dollars over ten years, and that it will be really difficult to forge bipartisan agreement on legislation and keep major interest groups on board. This obviously brought more angst to the deliberations, several Republicans…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: The Sleeper in Health Reform
The health reform legislation currently being crafted on Capitol Hill is undeniably complex. To oversimplify slightly it can be boiled down into four parts: coverage (subsidies for private coverage and Medicaid expansions); delivery and payment reforms; insurance market reforms and regulations; and prevention, with each broad category containing a range…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: On Health Reform, Will All Roads Meet in the Middle?
A few weeks ago a small group of upset single-payer advocates followed Senator Baucus into the parking garage of our D.C. building as he was arriving to do one of our health reform newsmaker breakfasts, cosponsored by Families USA and the National Federation of Independent Business. They were angry because…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: The Experts vs. The Public on Health Reform
In repeated Kaiser polls, we see a divide between what experts believe and what the public believes about some of the key issues in health reform. They don’t disagree on everything; far from it. But there is a wide gulf on basic beliefs about what is behind the problems in…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: The Health Care Industry’s Second Voluntary Effort
The announcement that health care industry groups plan to put on the table voluntarily a package of proposals to shave $2 trillion off the rate of increase in health spending over the next ten years immediately conjures up the image of the Voluntary Effort or VE launched with similar fanfare…
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