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Pulling it Together: The “Third School” for Controlling Health Care Costs?
For as long as I have been in the field, there have been two dominant schools of thought about how to control health care costs. One school, The Regulators, believed that the best way to slow increasing costs was to control the total resources going into the health care system:…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: Implementation
When I was a graduate student at MIT my adviser Jeffrey Pressman was a great political scientist who had just written the seminal book on program implementation. It was called, simply enough, Implementation, with a subhead that read: “how great expectations in Washington are dashed” (OK, we political scientists study…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: The Media’s Challenge In Health Reform
For many years now the news media has served as the public’s number one source of information on important issues like health reform. People rely on the news media to help them wade through claims and counter claims, understand how policy options will affect them and come to judgment on…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: Simple Arithmetic
This week we put out our annual benchmark survey of employer health coverage and costs. Two numbers jumped off the pages. The first number was the average cost of a family health insurance policy in 2009: $13,375. To put that number in context, if you are an employer, you can…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: This Could Be the Next Big Issue in Health Reform
No, this is not about “death panels.” The town hall meetings. The media coverage of the town hall meetings. Media polls about how the American people feel about the town hall meetings. And even the media myth busting and fact checking about the most extreme claims made at the town…
Policy Insights Read PostPulling it Together: Small $ for HIV Prevention
It’s no secret that the response to the HIV epidemic domestically has not kept pace with the response to the global epidemic. And in an earlier column called America Has Gone Quiet on HIV/AIDS I wrote about the growing complacency towards the domestic epidemic revealed in our recent survey of…
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