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The announcement that health care industry groups plan to put on the table voluntarily a package of proposals to shave $2 trillion off the rate of increase in health spending over the next ten years immediately conjures up the image of the Voluntary Effort or VE launched with similar fanfare in the Carter administration.
There is lots of apocalyptic talk these days about the collapse of the newspaper industry and the challenges facing news organizations. There is even talk of the unimaginable, my hometown paper The Boston Globe shutting down. Surely they know that Red Sox Nation cannot exist without the Globe Sports pages.
Several years ago Joanne Silberner from NPR offered some advice I liked. Joanne said that the secret to effective communication was to "have a killer anecdote and a killer number." Here is a killer number: 19.7.
The two big topics in Washington right now are the economy and health care. I've written before about how the two are linked, and in particular about how among the everyday economic problems people are having, paying for health care is a big one.
There is one poll number that may be more important to watch than any other if we have a big debate about health reform: The percentage of Americans who think that they or their families would be better off if the president and the Congress enacted major health reform legislation.
In what would be a domestic policy trifecta, we may be headed for interconnected big debates about economic recovery, entitlement programs and health reform. A core issue in the entitlement and health reform debates is the problem of rising health care costs.
Longer ago than I care to admit, I got my start in health policy at M.I.T. when I wrote a book about health care regulation.
We could be headed for a new schism in the debate about health reform.
Trends in the health insurance marketplace show substantial growth in high deductible health plans, especially among smaller firms, where 35% of workers are now covered by plans with a deductible of $1,000 or more. That's according to our recently released employer health benefits survey, which we have been conducting now for ten years.
New Orleans is a city still struggling with the aftermath of Katrina and the levee breaks. The people of New Orleans feel that the nation and the federal government have largely forgotten them.
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