Will State Waivers Save, Reform, or Sabotage Obamacare?

State Health Reform and the Role of 1115 Waivers

This article summarizes the status of State health reform and includes a table of major initiatives undertaken by each State. The Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA's) role in reviewing State waiver proposals is analyzed, and the author examines why States are likely to continue to seek section 1115 waivers, absent Federal health care reform. The often conflicting roles and responsibi...

Waivers, research, and health system reform.

Will Physical Scalability Sabotage Performance Gains?

any designers expect processor performance to keep improving at the current rate indefinitely as feature sizes shrink. However, as wire delays become a larger percentage of overall signal delay and as clock speeds grow faster than transistor speed, I believe performance increases will ultimately fall off. These delays are inevitable simply because wires are not keeping pace with the scaling of ...

Will Empathy Save Us?

Recent prescriptions for rescuing civilization from collapse involve extending our human capacity for empathy to a global scale. This is a worthy goal, but several indications leave grounds for cautious optimism at best. Evolutionary biology interprets non-kin helping behaviors as products of natural selection that rewarded only the transmission success of resident genes within ancestors, not t...

Health affairs blog post: 1332 waivers and the future of state health reform.