Seriously, Some Consensus About Health Care
By N. GREGORY MANKIW
WE are entering the season of polarization. With various Republicans vying to replace Barack Obama, the president eager to keep his job, and both the House and the Senate up for grabs, candidates from both sides of the aisle will spend the next year and a half stressing their differences.
But beneath this veneer of partisanship lie a few fundamental agreements. Consider health care, which will be at the center of the political debate. Here are four aspects of the issue in which Republicans and Democrats have stumbled into consensus.
PERSPECTIVE
Managed Competition for Medicare? Sobering Lessons from the Netherlands
NEJM | June 15, 2011 | Topics: International, Medicare and Medicaid
Kieke G.H. Okma, Ph.D., Theodore R. Marmor, Ph.D., and Jonathan Oberlander, Ph.D.
Discussions about U.S. health care reform are often parochial, with scant attention paid to other countries’ experiences. It is thus surprising that in the ongoing debate over Medicare, some U.S. commentators have turned to the Netherlands as a model of regulated competition among private insurance companies.1 The Dutch experience is particularly relevant given the proposal by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) to eliminate traditional Medicare and instead provide beneficiaries with vouchers to purchase private insurance. (The Republican majority in the House passed the Ryan plan as part of the 2012 budget resolution, but it was defeated in the Senate.)
http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=14712
With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America
By Peter Whoriskey,
It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent of about $1 million today. He and his family moved from a three-bedroom home to a four-bedroom home, about a half-mile away, in River Forest, Ill., an upscale Chicago suburb. He joined a country club. The company gave him a Cadillac. The money was good enough, in fact, that he sometimes turned down raises. He said making too much was bad for morale.
(Not) spreading the wealth
The income gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country has grown along with dramatic increases in CEO pay.
The American health care system is a significant contributor to income inequality in the U.S. - from those purchasing health care services and products to those selling them.
-SPC
-SPC
Hospitals courting primary-care doctors
By Lena H. Sun,
In one of the first concrete steps to remake the way medical care is delivered, hospitals are competing to hire primary-care physicians, trying to lure them from their private practices to work as salaried employees alongside specialists.
The push is forcing doctors to make decisions about how to deliver care to patients, many of whom have relied on long-standing relationships with trusted independent neighborhood physicians and wonder what lies ahead.
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