Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report Feature Highlights Recent Blog Entries
"Blog Watch" offers readers a roundup of health policy-related blog posts.
The American Prospect's Ezra Klein looks at a letter from Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) that says their "intention is for [health reform] legislation to be very similar." Klein says, "That's a far cry from 1994, when different committees -- including Kennedy's HELP Committee -- reported wildly different bills to the floor."
The Association of Health Care Journalists' Covering Health featured several posts on the AHCJ's annual meeting on April 16-19.
Maggie Mahar of the Century Foundation's Health Beat Blog examines the increasing costs of cancer drugs and why Medicare has been unable to slow them.
Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf on the Director's Blog posts a list of the agency's panel of health advisers.
Gooz News' Merrill Goozner looks at "loopholes" in FDA's 2007 Amendments Act that requires public reporting of clinical trial results.
Francois de Brantes and Lawton Burns on the Health Affairs Blog argue that changes to provider and hospital payment systems "must drive changes in the organization of the delivery of care, and not the other way around."
Marilyn Werber Serafini of the National Journal's Health Care Expert Blog asks her contributors about comparative effectiveness research, saying, "What treatments should be among the first to be compared?" Responders include Darrell Kirch, John Goodman, Leonard Schaeffer and Billy Tauzin.
Conn Carroll of the Heritage Foundation's The Foundry writes, "If the president is serious about entitlement reform, the savings his budget purposes for Medicare and Medicaid would be redirected back into those programs to restore their solvency rather than spending those savings on expanding coverage to other programs."
Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic's The Treatment looks at a Politico article examining congressional Republicans' health care messaging and says, "Once the actual details of legislation are on the table, Republicans and their allies may quickly find both unity and a good message. But I suspect they'll have a harder time doing it this year than they did last time around (in 1993)." James Capretta of Diagnosis advises, "A GOP plan will need to include effective government oversight to give the public confidence that they will have good options to choose from in a reformed marketplace."
Uwe Reinhardt on the New York Times' Economix discusses the German health system as an example of a universal health care system that does not include a public plan. Reinhardt concludes, "The $64,000 question is whether America's private health insurers would be willing to countenance the tight regulation required for that approach."
John Graham of the State Policy Network's State Policy Blog looks at a new mandated benefit for oral anticancer drugs in Oregon that was not subjected to the state's usual requirement of a report on the costs, efficacy and other effects of a new treatment or therapy.