Date Post Title Post Summary Topics
Dec 20, 2011 Small Business and Exchanges: SHOP Till You Drop Assuming the 2010 health care law survives through 2014, one of the big questions is the future of small-group insurance plans – those in which the employer chooses and administers a plan or plans for employees. The health insurance exchanges built into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) create mechanisms for small-group survival, but also powerful incentives for their dissolution. Costs & Economic Analysis | Health Reform
Dec 15, 2011 Paying Patients to Take Drugs or Helping Them Make Informed Choices? While there is certainly evidence that cost influences a person’s likelihood of refilling medications, price is only one of many factors. It’s not a single conscious choice between taking a pill or not; it is ongoing management of a complex array of daily and weekly activities. Chronic Disease | Consumer Choice | Public Health
Dec 13, 2011 The Key to Longevity? A Healthy Lifestyle The secrets of longevity are not so secret any more. Scientists know a lot about how diet, exercise, and social connections can extend the human lifespan. Study after study has shown that genes don’t affect life expectancy nearly as much as the environment. Enter Dan Buettner, best-selling author of The Blue Zones, who wrote a fascinating account of four places in the world where people live the longest – outliving Americans by more than a decade. Public Health
Dec 8, 2011 Hiding in Plain Sight: Seeing the Person Beyond the Patient High-quality, cost-effective health care delivery is all about targeting: the right care, by the right provider, at the right time, in the right place, and for the right cost. It sounds straightforward, almost easy. The challenge to getting it right is understanding the range of variables in a person’s life that drive health care use and costs. Chronic Disease | Medicare
Dec 6, 2011 Finding The Sweet Spot Where Geriatrics, Palliative Care, and System Integration Intersect Dealing with the hard stuff – the very sick, the complex, the dying – is the essence of quality health care in an aging society. Aging | Chronic Disease | Hospitals
Dec 1, 2011 What is “Sustainable” Health Spending? (Part I) There is surprisingly little consensus – and not even much being written – about what growth rate would be “sustainable”? Defining sustainable growth and establishing a credible target is one of our top research priorities. Health Reform | Medicare