Everyone should read this article in Health Affairs. It is the moving story of a woman diagnosed with terminal breast cancer who chose palliative treatment over interventionist strategies. Amy Berman is one knowledgeable and connected patient. She is a nurse, works for a health foundation in New York, and is a long time policy leader in health care. She received a terrible …

On April 13, 2012, CHRT is sponsoring a symposium geared to health policy-makers, funders and researchers, to ask this question: can individuals from these three worlds do a better job of working together? I come from the health policy world at the state level, and more recently have a toe in the academic world, so I’ve had the chance to …

Everybody and their brother will be blogging about the Supreme Court arguments on health care reform over the next several weeks. I do not want to add to the noise by focusing on the arguments and/or who has the winning position: many others will offer that kind of analysis. Instead, I want to focus on what will happen if the …

The Feb. 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine had an excellent commentary by Peter Newman about how difficult it is to talk to the public about health care costs. He captures the issue well: “The problem is that no one in charge seems willing to acknowledge that getting a handle on cost growth will also involve uncomfortable …

In late January, just after my fellow instructors and I had led our students at the U-M School of Public Health in a discussion of the complexity of health coverage, and the difficulty of actually doing what health insurers do given the American system of financing health care, the New York times ran an opinion piece by Ezekiel Emanuel and Jeffrey Liebman that started like …

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported on some research that would make anyone who is trying to inform public policy lose sleep.  The story described just how impervious to the facts people often are in their assessments of data relevant to public policy. Case in point: immigration. The survey showed that people believe the percentage of U.S. residents …

With lawmakers under increasing pressure to reduce overall federal spending, funding has been limited in many areas of health research and enforcement. Even before the recent focus on deficit reduction, funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been significantly constrained. In the 10 years prior to fiscal year 2008, the NIH budget grew by 31 percent, to $29 …

Well, the federal government has spoken about its intent with regard to defining essential benefits, and the answer is: leave it to the states. As Tim Jost notes in his latest blog post, there are some (probably, most) who assumed the Affordable Care Act would result in more uniformity in essential benefits across the country. But instead (no doubt bowing to …

OK, I admit it: we made a mistake. Earlier this year, we were asked if we had ever seen a one-page flow chart of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from a consumer perspective. We hadn’t seen one—and after much looking, still didn’t—so we decided to create one ourselves. It seemed like such a simple idea. Hmmm—not so simple in the …

As we continue to focus on health care spending, it is important to look at the tools we’ve tried already and learn from our experience – especially our mistakes. In health care, it seems that every action taken to reduce spending leads to an equal and opposite reaction elsewhere in the system. This issue has been well illustrated by the …