Health Policy Program: Latest Articles

Year after year, Republicans try to pass legislation that would limit medical malpractice awards. Fix the tort system, they argue, and we fix rising health-care costs. And year after year, Democrats resist placing arbitrary caps on awards to people who may have suffered from an egregious medical error. The fight plays out like a predictable old Western -- good guys versus bad guys. Depending on your politics, the villain is either the greedy doctor or the greedy trial lawyer.

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The Medicare payment reforms in both the House and the Senate bills will help to slow the growth of costs by rewarding value over volume, as will the proposed Medicare commission and the tax on insurers who offer high-cost health plans, which are in the Senate Finance Committee bill. And both House and Senate legislation also include “innovation centers” which will allow us to test different payment models and health care processes.

Even with these steps, the reform bills could be strengthened. Specifically:

Doctors call them frequent fliers.

They are the patients who leave the hospital, only to boomerang back days or weeks later. They have become a front-burner challenge not only for hospitals and doctors but also for those trying to rein in rising costs.

Typically elderly and suffering from the chronic diseases that account for 75 percent of health-care spending, their experiences of being readmitted time and again reflect many of the deficiencies in a fragmented, poorly coordinated health system geared toward acute care.

Health care reform worth the name would accomplish two things: (1) quality, affordable coverage for all, and (2) a high-quality health system that is economically sustainable. These goals are linked --one cannot be achieved without the other. We must summon the courage to do bold reforms, not timid half-measures, when the going gets tough.

The United States and China have more in common than their paramount importance in the global economy. The citizens of both countries share the same basic complaint: bad healthcare. As the White House prepares to roll out its plan to overhaul the United States' woefully inadequate health insurance system, it may be instructive to look across the Pacific, where an even more ambitious effort is underway to give access to healthcare to the millions left behind by China's rapid economic… more