Health Policy Program: Latest Articles

With the pharmaceutical industry spending around $3 billion a year advertising its products directly to consumers, you can't open a magazine, watch television or read a newspaper without stumbling over a pitch for this or that drug. So when an editor first alerted me to a series of ads being run by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, I assumed it was just more of the same. Each ad shows a photo of an actual cancer patient, under headlines such as, "Stunning… more

Still smarting from defeat, a leading activist ruefully explained why once-promising plans to expand health coverage had failed. Health legislation, he said, affected "powerful group interests" and was easy fodder for scare-tactic attacks. "All these fears, some justified, some exaggerated, and some altogether fanciful," he said, "produced such a confusion of group conflicts that only a clear recognition of the need... might have overcome it, and that clear recognition was lacking."

All this would be an incisive assessment of the demise… more

Today we remember Medicare's establishment in July 1965 as a ringing affirmation of the ideal of social insurance. Less well remembered is how close Washington came to creating a very different system. Not long before Medicare's passage, the Kennedy administration seemed on the verge of a compromise with Senator Jacob Javits, the moderate Republican from New York. Senator Javits and his allies wanted to give private insurance a leading place in the new program so government could play a smaller… more

Among President Bush's top priorities, he said in the State of the Union address, is "high quality, affordable health care for all Americans." Yet he offered precious few specifics. With nearly three million Americans losing their health insurance in the last two years alone and health care costs rising at the highest rate in a decade, America needs a bold plan.

The most promising solution to America's health care crisis is mandatory insurance. For the same reasons most states require… more

In 1986 the Japanese health department launched a campaign to screen infants for neuroblastoma, the second most common form of early-childhood cancer, after leukemia. The test was easy to administer: Parents simply pressed a piece of filter paper to their baby's wet diaper, allowed the paper to dry, and then mailed it to a laboratory. Doctors had known since the 1950s that neuroblastoma tumors cause the body to excrete an unmistakable chemical signature in the urine; in the 1980s analyzing… more