W hen Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-ME, pulled the plug on the healthcare reform debate September 26, it marked the end of a long, contentious, expensive legislative battle—for now. Many analysts in Washington, DC, believe this debate is far from over. However, politics and the need to return home to campaign for midterm elections have won out in the near term. The continuing pressu...

Fifty-one years ago, president john f. Kennedy called on the United States to send a man safely to the moon within the decade. This year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse urged Rhode Island’s Healthcare Reform Commission to define its corresponding “moon shot” for transforming healthcare. We believe Rhode Island is uniquely positioned to help lead the nation toward a shared vision of that “healthcare mo...

No one's sure what health reform will bring. But the time for providers to get agile is now" (Deloitte 2010). As an active participant in the national healthcare reform debate for the past several years, I have been troubled by the continued lack of a meaningful dialogue about healthcare in this country. A great deal has been written about the challenges presented by the sweeping healthcare ref...

On March 21, 2010, the United States Congress passed the most comprehensive healthcare reform bill since the formation of Medicare. The legislation’s greatest impact will be to improve access for nearly 50 million Americans who are presently uninsured. Yet the bill does little to tackle the fundamental problems of the payment and delivery systems— problems that have resulted in major quality ga...

f healthcare reform is not a political activity, it's going to be an economic o n e , " predic ted James Bentley, American Hospi ta l Association (AHA) senior vice president for policy, in a conversation. A look at recent hospital trends and an analysis from Wall Street bears this out. As competitive economic pressures increase in the healthcare system, in large part fueled by the growth of man...

We evaluate the effect of tort reform on employer-sponsored health insurance premiums by exploiting state-level variation in the timing of reforms. Using a dataset of healthplans representing over 10 million Americans annually between 1998 and 2006, we find that caps on non-economic damages, collateral source reform, and joint and several liability reform reduce premiums by 1 to 2 percent each....

forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. they offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. i would like to offer a canadian perspective. if we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

The 2009-10 Argus Commission was charged to examine the topic of the pharmacist’s contribution to primary healthcare delivery in the context of national healthcare reform and identify the resources of the Academy and the profession needed to engage in the national conversation. The charge further requested the Argus Commission to scan the environment to determine the opportunities for expansion...

OBJECTIVE Chile, a South American country recently defined as a high-income nation, carried out a major healthcare system reform from 2005 onwards that aimed at reducing socioeconomic inequality in health. This study aimed to estimate income-related inequality in self-reported health status (SRHS) in 2000 and 2013, before and after the reform, for the entire adult Chilean population. METHODS ...

BACKGROUND In the Netherlands in 2006, a health insurance system reform took place in which regulated competition between insurers and providers is key. In this context, the government placed greater emphasis on patients being able to choose health insurers and providers as a precondition for competition. Patient choice became an instrument instead of solely a goal in itself. In the current stu...