Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report Feature Highlights Recent Blog Entries
"Blog Watch" offers readers a roundup of health policy-related blog posts.
Harold Pollack on the American Prospect's Ezra Klein blog looks at the potential costs and benefits of eliminating the Medicare disability waiting period.
Michael Cannon of Cato@Liberty compares single taxicab fare systems to payment systems for medical care and says, "Markets use competition between different payment systems to improve quality and reduce costs, particularly in markets with uncertainty. That form of competition is usually lost when government runs the show."
John Goodman of his eponymous Health Policy Blog disagrees with a Commonwealth Fund report looking at ways to help laid-off employees through COBRA or Medicaid, and says, "What people who are transitioning in the labor market really need is insurance that is private, portable (traveling with them from job to job), and tailored to their own individual and family needs."
Maggie Mahar of the Century Foundation's Health Beat Blog looks at a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper on the "amenities" race (a competition for things like rooms and meal services) between some hospitals. Mahar examines whether patients placed a higher value on amenities than hospital mortality rates.
Kevin Grumbach on the Health Affairs Blog presents a plan to "revitalize" primary care in the second of two posts (here and here) on primary care in the U.S.
Sarah Rubenstein of the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog reports on further job cuts in the pharmaceutical industry.
Bill Crounse of Microsoft's HealthBlog discusses President Obama's health information technology proposals and says health IT "is not by itself a solution." Crounse believes the "real power of electronic records and health information" is from better information and tools for patients, along with attention and support from medical professionals.
James Capretta on the National Review Online's The Corner looks at health care provisions in the economic stimulus bill and says "just as troubling" as the cost "is the large number of far-reaching policy changes tucked away in the bill."
Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic's The Treatment reports on Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-Calif.) comment on health reform that "[w]e need to get this job accomplished this year." Cohn says, "By putting his imprimatur on a year-one timetable, he not only pushes the process forward -- he signals that it may actually result in success."
