Palliative care, health policy, and health reform

From the Health Affairs Blog: In the United States, value is the new health care imperative – improving quality while controlling costs.  We spend nearly twice the rate of comparable nations, yet have poorer health outcomes.  In 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), mandating a new emphasis on paying …

Implementing health reform: An October through December enrollment report

From the Health Affairs Blog: On January 13, 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report on the Health Insurance Marketplace covering the first three months of open enrollment, October 1 through December 28, 2013. The data are reported cumulatively over the three month period rather than only for December, recognizing the …

Making New York the healthiest state

From the Health Affairs Blog: In early December, the New York State Health Foundation and the New York State Department of Health cosponsored a summit focused on improving population health, with the title, “Making New York the Healthiest State: Achieving the Triple Aim.” We had hoped to convince a critical mass of health sector leaders to come together for …

Better care at lower cost: Is it possible?

From the Commonwealth Fund: Evidence continues to pour in that America's sky-high health care spending is not only unsustainable, it isn't making us any healthier either—especially compared with other advanced countries. But what are we to do about it? In Better Care at Lower Cost: Is It Possible?, we examine the sources of high costs in the …

New health policy brief: Specialty pharmaceuticals

From Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Specialty pharmaceuticals--drugs and biologics used to treat chronic, serious, or life-threatening diseases--are complex to manufacture and distribute, often difficult to administer, and may require special patient monitoring. They are a rapidly growing share of the costs borne by both public and private health plans. A patient …

Unpacking the FDA’s new Trans fat ban

Ten University of Michigan School of Public Health graduate students are once again blogging at Mind the Science Gap.  Here's a recent post on a ruling by the Food & Drug Adminstration on trans fats. Enjoy--& comment!

Life expectancy approach for measuring disparities

From the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ): As a new way to measure health care disparities, a new AHRQ study proposes analyzing health insurance status and medical need over a typical lifetime by ethnic group. This life expectancy approach can estimate the number of years that racial/ethnic groups are subject to “health insurance double jeopardy,” …

Extending Gene-Environment Interactions into Policy Domains: The Case of Tobacco Taxation

Jason Fletcher,  associate professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, will present the first seminar of the 2013-2014 invited speaker series on population health issues sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program (http://www.sph.umich.edu/rwjhssp/) and the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health (http://www.sph.umich.edu/cseph/). A specialist in health economics, economics …

State lessons on health system reform

There is a new issue brief available from the Commonwealth Fund:  State Innovation Models: Early Experiences and Challenges of an Initiative to Advance Broad Health System Reform. Since July 2012, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has awarded 25 states nearly $300 million to help them plan, design, and test new ways to improve …

The latest Health Wonk Review – Data, medicine, insurance reform, and more

From the Health Affairs Blog and Boston Health News: Health data is a theme of this edition of the Health Wonk Review because it is also the focus of the current Knight News Challenge. That contest rewards media innovation with seed money. They use the word “challenge” literally, asking for innovative responses to question:  How …