How will Health Reform Affect You?

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has put together a series of briefs which explain how Health Reform will affect various types of consumers.  These briefs include: Young adults, Seniors, Children, Individual and small-group premiums. Hospitals, and Physicians. Although are a lot of these types of guides out there, the RWJ briefs are generally fairly comprehensive…

Does Health Reform Change the Malpractice System

Health Reform (a.k.a. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [PPACA]) provides two small provisions that will affect malpractice costs.  Randall Bobvjerg explains: “As enacted, PPACA contained only two, quite limited malpractice provisions.  Section 10607 authorized malpractice demonstrations by states, and section 10608 extended federal malpractice protections to free clinics’ nonmedical personnel. The demonstration authority comes…

Who’s running the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI)?

As part of Health Reform, the government created the a center to study clinical effectiveness of different health treatments.  This center, known as the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), “does not have the power to mandate or even endorse coverage rules or reimbursement for any particular treatment.”  What leverage does the Institute have?  Not too…

How will Health Reform Affect California?

This policy brief provides the answer.  One interesting finding is how the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual mandate may put a bind on poor, legal immigrants. “Legal immigrants with less than five years of legal permanent residency will face the same requirement as native born U.S. citizens to have health insurance coverage.  However, legal immigrants…

Three Tiers of Accountable Care Organizations

The Healthcare Economist has previously reviewed different forms of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs).  Implementing ACOs in practice, however, may prove more difficult.  How could the government or private insurers incentivize providers to provide integrated care?  How can they incentivize providers do perform fewer services and, thus, make less money? An article by Shortell and Casalino…

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation

Medicare and Innovation in the same sentence?  Yes indeed. As part of Health Reform [i.e, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)], the government mandated the creation of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMI). What does CMI do?  “The stated purpose of the CMI is to test innovative payment and service delivery models…

Effect of Massachusetts Health Reform on Hospital and Preventive Care

Kolstad and Kowalski (2010) examine how the Massachusetts individual mandate affected uninsurance rates, hospital and outpatient utilization, and preventive care: “Among the population discharged from the hospital in Massachusetts, the reform decreased uninsurance by 28% relative to its initial level. Increased coverage affected utilization patterns by decreasing length of stay and the number of inpatient…