FOR THE BETTER part of this decade, Massachusetts had been on a roll regarding its health system’s performance. Since passage of the 2006 universal health insurance law, we’ve been tops in having the lowest number of uninsured the nation. Recent national surveys on cost, quality, access, and public health from the Commonwealth Fund, the United […]
[I wrote this new commentary for the Milbank Quarterly.] In noticeable ways our current health reform period resembles the 2005-2006 era when political leaders, stakeholders, and think tanks began formulating proposals to prepare for a future national effort to achieve comprehensive health reform, a process that came to fruition with the signing of the Affordable […]
[This new commentary was just published by the Milbank Quarterly.] The years 2013 through 2016 were excruciating for the Massachusetts Health Connector. In 2013, the Connector was among the nation’s most troubled federal/state health insurance exchanges, as it endured an epic collapse of its new website to help consumers purchase individual health insurance. Since then, […]
[I wrote this commentary for the spring issue of Commonwealth Magazine. I am watching the new crop of 17 Accountable Care Organizations — ACOs — with great interest. This is a nationally important demonstration that also holds risks for the medical care of many MassHealth enrollees.] ON MARCH 1, the state’s Medicaid program—known as MassHealth—entered […]
[Last summer, I wrote the following review of The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System by David Barton Smith. The review just came out in The Common Reader. I still think the book is required reading in our times. And I love the cartoon!] On a […]
[This column was just published on the website of the Milbank Quarterly.] A consistent theme in 2017 Republican Congressional efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was the intent to empower the 50 states to use federal funds to reengineer their Medicaid and individual health insurance markets as they see fit. If […]
[The Washington Post’s Health 202 Column offered a set of “eulogies” on the fate of the ACA’s individual mandate — the mandate penalty was reduced to zero by the Republican’s newly approved tax-cut legislation. I had the last word…] … So it’s not shocking that’s the part of Obamacare they chose to target in their […]
[I’ve been super busy this fall and unable to keep up with writing about the ACA. I’m back in the saddle and here I go again. This commentary was just published on the Commonwealth Magazine website.] A CORE TENET of behavioral economics is that most of us are biased toward optimism. I plead guilty. Today’s […]
[This commentary was posted by the Milbank Quarterly this week.] Seeing, hearing, reading, and feeling the new grassroots ferment among progressive Americans for a single-payer health care system, my gut reaction is: I get it. As newly documented in Elizabeth Rosenthal’s book, An American Sickness,1 and the Commonwealth Fund’s report, Mirror, Mirror 2017,2 our health […]
