Kaiser Family Foundation Brief Provides Information on Uninsured; NEJM Perspectives Discuss Provider Payments, Medical Homes

• "Covering the Uninsured: Options for Reform," Kaiser Family Foundation: The election brief provides key facts about the nation's uninsured population, why people are uninsured and why being uninsured is a problem. The brief also presents broad policy options for covering the uninsured population and proposes some questions to help evaluate the health care plans of presidential nominees Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.). The brief is the first in a series that the Foundation will release online as part of its continuing work on health care and the election (Kaiser Family Foundation release, 9/17).
  
  
• "Beyond Pay-for-Performance -- Emerging Models of Provider-Payment Reform," New England Journal of Medicine: In the perspective, Meredith Rosenthal discusses different approaches to overhauling the health care provider payment system. She writes that there are "fundamentally, no 'new' methods of health care payment," adding that it "remains to be seen" which "new combinations of old ideas" will "yield the best balance of meaningful incentives for cost control and quality improvement" (Rosenthal, NEJM, 9/18).
  
  
• "Building a Medical Neighborhood for the Medical Home," NEJM: In the perspective, Elliott Fisher -- professor of medicine, community and family medicine and the director of the Center for Health Policy Research at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice -- discusses "several important barriers to the clinical and financial success of the medical home model." He writes, "What has been missing so far has been an effort to implement this model in concert with other reforms that more effectively align the interests of all physicians and hospitals toward the improvement of patient care" (Fisher, NEJM, 9/18).
  
  
• "No Place Like Home -- Testing a New Model of Care Delivery," NEJM: John Iglehart, a national correspondent for NEJM, in the perspective writes that a CMS demonstration program testing the possibility of controlling growth of Medicare costs through the use of medical homes, "if successful, will be one small step along what many policymakers view as a path toward slower growth of expenditures and improved care under Medicare." He writes that if the next administration and Congress try to overhaul the U.S. health care system in 2009, they should follow a recommendation by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which stresses recognition that "the process of fundamental reform is evolutionary, and not knowing the final design should not deter us from beginning" (Iglehart, NEJM, 9/18).