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Remember the “government takeover of the health care system” argument that critics of the health reform law have used?  Well, last week the Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published the latest projections of health spending in the journal Health Affairs.  Attention focused mainly…

Medicaid is the nation’s primary health insurance program for low-income people and people with disabilities, covering more than 60 million people this year.  And it’s about to get a lot of attention: it’s likely to be a prime target for spending reductions by “deficit hawks” in debate over the budget;…

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. That’s the average number of years between major attempts at health reform since Harry…

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.…

We could be headed for a new schism in the debate about health reform. Not the familiar gulf between advocates of the market and government, or the predictable one between deficit hawks and spenders, but a new one that crosses traditional partisan and ideological lines between advocates of long-term reform of the health care delivery…

In this JAMA Health Forum column, KFF’s Drew Altman and Larry Levitt examine how the complexity of the health care system  – with all of its red tape – can be as big a problem for patients as the traditional big three problems of costs, quality and access.

The House will soon vote to repeal the health reform law, the Senate won’t, and the President would veto it if they did.  So what does a House vote for repeal mean? It is, of course, a campaign promise kept to the political right.  It is also a signal from…

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 his Beyond the Data column, KFF President and CEO Drew Altman discusses how how family health coverage is no longer affordable for workers at small employers, contributing to the health cost crisis affecting the American people.