Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report Rounds Up Highlights From This Week’s JAMA

The Aug. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association features several pieces that address health policy concerns. The following is a brief summary of those pieces:

• "Uninsured Worker Rate Rises": A short piece in JAMA's "Health Agencies Update" section presents data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Medical Expenditure Panel Survey finding that the rate of uninsurance among U.S. residents who earn between $10 and $15 per hour increased from 10.6% in 1996 to 12.9% in 2000. The MEPS data is available online.
  
• "Preserving Privacy, Preventing Discrimination Becomes the Province of Genetics Experts": This "Medical News and Perspectives" analysis finds that "threats to genetic privacy and the potential for discrimination based on genetic data are likely to increase as researchers glean more information from the Human Genome Project."
  
• "A Primary Care Home for Americans: Putting the House in Order": The first in a new JAMA series on primary care, this article "outlines the daunting challenges facing primary care today," including "physician stress, inadequate performance in managing chronic illness and inability to provide prompt access and reliable continuity of care." The article concludes that "[f]undamental redesign is needed" to improve care access and quality without creating more work for physicians or raising health care costs. An abstract of the article is available online.