Primary Contact: Main Office Line: (734) 998-7555 or CHRT-info@umich.edu
New Products on the Health Insurance Exchange: What is Old Becomes New
When I was at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, we used to say that you couldn’t sell any products without having all key providers included in them. But, that was at a time when health benefits were considered “fringe benefits,” unions were powerful drivers of benefit designs and employers covered most of the health insurance premium. Times, however, are …
Read more >A Crucial Ingredient in the Affordable Care Act to Getting Young People to Get Coverage
Like everyone I know who is a health policy junkie, I have been very excited about the launch of the health insurance exchanges. But, my excitement is not just because of my professional interest—and wanting to see how these things actually work and how health care changes as a result—it is also for personal reasons. My 27-year-old goddaughter had to …
Read more >Explaining the Affordable Care Act
Health care reform is indeed a journey—not a destination. And, judging from all of the requests that our Center is getting to explain the Affordable Care Act, it is probably going to be a journey for a very long time (assuming, of course, that it doesn’t get “defunded”/ delayed/repealed or otherwise stopped in the next few couple of weeks!). So, …
Read more >The Importance of Federally Qualified Health Centers and the ACA
Editor’s Note: This column appeared in Bridge Magazine. About six months after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed in 2010, our Center hosted a symposium in Ann Arbor on the future of the health care safety net. Sara Rosenbaum, an expert on both the ACA and federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), spoke at the event and her remarks emphasized …
Read more >Patient Engagement and Shared Decision Making: Is This the Moment?
Patient engagement is a hot topic in health care right now. Providers, regulators and health plans are all trying to figure out how to better involve patients in their own medical care. Shared decision making—a concept that grew out of Jack Wennberg’s work on regional variation in the use of health care services—is a tool that fits right into the …
Read more >Myths and Misperceptions: Who Will Be Helped by the Coverage Expansions in the ACA?
The debate about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) rages on as we get closer and closer to the big coverage changes that take effect starting on January 1, 2014 (with open enrollments for the health insurance exchange beginning in just a few months). The nature of the debates indicates that there is some misperception about who will be helped by …
Read more >The Power of Incentives: The Story of Electronic Medical Records
In 1999, The Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a seminal report on the safety of health care in the U.S.: To Err is Human. The IOM noted that up to 98,000 deaths occurred annually as a result of errors in the health care system. They recommended systemic change to improve the safety of the system. One of the recommendations included …
Read more >Obamacare seems to be Helping to Curtail Health Care Costs
Editor’s Note: This column previously appeared in Bridge Magazine. In recent months, a conversation has burgeoned in health and public policy forums about the slowdown in the growth of health care spending. We are all asking the same questions: Is this slowdown real? Are some of the past cost containment efforts and recent provisions in the ACA beginning to take …
Read more >The Medicaid Expansion in Michigan Needs to Get Done Now
Editor’s Note: This column previously appeared in Bridge Magazine. On February 6, 2013, Governor Snyder announced his support for expanding Medicaid as envisioned in the Affordable Care Act. In his announcement, he talked about how the expansion would help hundreds of thousands of people in Michigan (our own estimates at the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation put the numbers …
Read more >Insurance Coverage in the Small Employer Market: Implications of the Affordable Care Act
Newspaper headlines about small employers’ fears of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) make it seem like there will be a major cataclysm in the small employer health insurance market come January 1, 2014. What most of these stories miss, however, is that a cataclysm has already occurred in employment-based coverage and the likely impacts of the ACA on the small …
Read more >