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 whether Office of Management and Budget director-designate Peter Orszag can unite "budget hawks" and "reformers" with his argument "that fiscal responsibility means health care reform."

Michael Cannon of CatoLiberty points to a new paper on how to improve care coordination, saying, "government prevents coordination of care, and that improving coordination requires reducing government's role."

Igor Volsky of the Center for American Progress Action Fund's Wonk Room looks at data showing few children enrolling in SCHIP had private insurance prior to enrolling in the program.

David Brailer on the Health Affairs Blog lays out a health information technology agenda for President-elect Barack Obama. Brailer, whom President Bush tapped as the first National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, said both Bush and Obama agree that "information technology is essential to reforming our health care system."

Michael Miller of the Health Care Policy and Communications Blog looks at trends in health care spending and says because physicians control such a large part of health spending, "it will be crucial to change how healthcare is delivered if health care costs are to be controlled."

Bob Laszewski of Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review looks at UnitedHealth Group's settlement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over fees for out-of-network services and says, "$50 million is peanuts compared to the out-of-network customary and reasonable savings any one of the big health plans achieves every year and this settlement makes the ability of state medical societies and trial lawyers to attack the system much harder."

John Goodman of his eponymous Health Policy Blog proposes using SCHIP funds to make the federal income child tax credit refundable and conditional upon proof of the child's health insurance. Goodman says this idea could test competition between public or private plans because parents could use the tax credit for either SCHIP, Medicaid or private insurance.

Health Populi's Jane Sarasohn-Kahn looks at ways the economic recession may lead to more underinsured and uninsured U.S. residents, especially if employers raise deductibles or if laid-off workers cannot afford COBRA policies. Sarasohn-Kahn writes, "Employers in the midst of the recession are looking for ways to stem health cost increases -- they were doing so in fairly good times, and now in the 2007-9 recession, are intensely concerned about health benefit costs."

Marilyn Werber-Serafini of the National Journal's Health Care Expert Blog asks, "Would it really do much good to extend the length of COBRA health insurance coverage as part of an economic stimulus package? Would people really sign up? Does COBRA ever really work well?" Responders include Karen Davis, James Gelfand, Newt Gingrich, Ron Pollack, Uwe Reinhardt, Raymond Scheppach and Andy Stern. Judith Graham of the Chicago Tribune's Triage posts resources on COBRA.

Paul Testa of the New America Foundation's New Health Dialogue looks at Obama's comments and new reports on investing in health IT and notes, "health IT must be incorporated within broader changes to our health care system."

Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic's new health care blog, The Treatment, looks at congressional Democrats' plan to pass SCHIP reauthorization and efforts to enable children of documented immigrants to enroll in the program.


Reprinted with kind permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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