Pulling it Together: Forget Math and Science, Teach Civics (Or Why We Need to Bring Back Schoolhouse Rock) February 10, 2011 Perspective I am seldom surprised by our poll findings, but this month’s tracking poll produced a doozy. Twenty-two percent of the American people think the Affordable Care Act has been repealed, and another 26 percent aren’t sure. Those are surprisingly large numbers even with the 52 percent who still know it…
Pulling it Together: Duals: The National Health Reform Experiment We Should Be talking More About June 1, 2012 Perspective The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and 26 states are moving to launch a large scale managed care demonstration project potentially involving millions of the poorest, sickest, most expensive Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, the so-called dual eligibles. The experiment is getting more and more attention from policy experts,…
Pulling it Together: The “Third School” for Controlling Health Care Costs? October 26, 2009 Perspective 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:…
Pulling it Together from Drew Altman: Multiple Agendas for Controlling Health Care Costs January 26, 2009 Perspective In what would be a domestic policy trifecta, we may be headed for interconnected big debates about economic recovery, entitlement programs and health reform. A core issue in the entitlement and health reform debates is the problem of rising health care costs. President Obama, now apparently fully briefed on the…
Pulling it Together: Simple Arithmetic September 10, 2009 Perspective 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…
Pulling it Together: Anticipating the Polls about Health February 5, 2010 Perspective Tuesday, February 2nd marked a milestone of sorts in the health reform debate: there was no story on health reform in the New York Times (national edition). I haven’t done a study, but as a professional New York Times (NYT) reader, I am virtually certain that this is the first…
Pulling it Together: Health Reform’s Six-Month Checkup September 23, 2010 Perspective Six months after its enactment, there are two totally different stories to tell about the health-reform law. The public remains split on the law largely along traditional partisan lines. Confusion and misperception are rampant, with more than a third of seniors still thinking the law contains “death panels” (it does…
Pulling It Together: What Do We Want Health Insurance To Be? September 26, 2008 Perspective Trends in the health insurance marketplace show substantial growth in high deductible health plans, especially among smaller firms, where 35% of workers are now covered by plans with a deductible of $1,000 or more. That’s according to our recently released employer health benefits survey, which we have been conducting now…
The Medical Bill Score: How the Public Judges Health Care October 3, 2017 Perspective In an Axios column, Drew Altman discusses how the public “scores” major health proposals like Graham-Cassidy or single payer, and proposes a “Medical Bills Score” for health.
One Big Thing People Don’t Know About Single Payer November 2, 2017 Perspective In this Axios column, Drew Altman discusses a challenge for single payer which has not received much attention – a large share of the American people do not think they would have to change their current health insurance arrangements if there were a Medicare-for-all style single payer plan.
