The Washington Post has him nailed:
This is the second installment of our new feature: Curbside Consult. For the uninitiated, curbside consults are a venerable medical tradition, whereby a doctor seeks informal advice from an experienced colleague in treating a patient with a complex condition. In covering or understanding complex health and social policies, we need sometimes help too.
Today’s interview is with Katherine Swartz, PhD. She is Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Author of Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-Class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do, she has researched state efforts to cover the uninsured and to help people with costly conditions who fare poorly in the private health insurance market.
Swartz is a particular expert in the economics of high-risk pools (HRPs--sorry for the acronym) and reinsurance. If you follow health reform, you’ve probably heard these terms thrown around without a lot of discussion of what these terms actually mean.
To put it simply, HRPs are special insurance plans for people who couldn't get coverage on their own, because of costly pre-existing medical conditions. Reinsurance is probably best explained as "insurance for the insurers." It's a special fund that reimburses insurers for the super-high claims of catastrophic medical expenses. The idea is that this spreads the burden of those expenses as widely as possible, while removing (at least partly) the incentive insurers have to avoid risky beneficiaries.
Both parties propose HRPs and reinsurance to address the immediate and long-term challenges in financing care for people with costly conditions. President Obama mentioned HRPs in his address before Congress to offer quick help to people facing the dual challenges of uninsurance and serious illness. Such provisions are contained in the Baucus bill and in recently-proposed Republican amendments. The Bush administration made modest investments in HRPs. Senator McCain’s 2008 health plan made heavy use of them, as do current Republican proposals presented in the House.
This is the second installment of our new feature: Curbside Consult. For the uninitiated, curbside consults are a venerable medical tradition, whereby a doctor seeks informal advice from an experienced colleague in treating a patient with a complex condition. In covering or understanding complex health and social policies, we need sometimes help too.
Today’s interview is with Katherine Swartz, PhD. She is Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Author of Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-Class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do, she has researched state efforts to cover the uninsured and to help people with costly conditions who fare poorly in the private health insurance market.
Swartz is a particular expert in the economics of high-risk pools (HRPs--sorry for the acronym) and reinsurance. If you follow health reform, you’ve probably heard these terms thrown around without a lot of discussion of what these terms actually mean.
To put it simply, HRPs are special insurance plans for people who couldn't get coverage on their own, because of costly pre-existing medical conditions. Reinsurance is probably best explained as "insurance for the insurers." It's a special fund that reimburses insurers for the super-high claims of catastrophic medical expenses. The idea is that this spreads the burden of those expenses as widely as possible, while removing (at least partly) the incentive insurers have to avoid risky beneficiaries.
Both parties propose HRPs and reinsurance to address the immediate and long-term challenges in financing care for people with costly conditions. President Obama mentioned HRPs in his address before Congress to offer quick help to people facing the dual challenges of uninsurance and serious illness. Such provisions are contained in the Baucus bill and in recently-proposed Republican amendments. The Bush administration made modest investments in HRPs. Senator McCain’s 2008 health plan made heavy use of them, as do current Republican proposals presented in the House.
Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
Greg Mankiw writes that the gas tax is not an issue that divides liberals and conservatives, but rather one that divides political consultants and policy wonks. I would put comparative effectiveness research (CER) in the same category.
Earlier this month, Joe the Plumber Wurzelbacher--last seen serving as the third wheel on John McCain and Sarah Palin's increasingly disastrous blind date--traded in his toilet jack for a handheld microphone and traveled to the Middle East to become a foreign correspondent covering the Israel-Hamas war for the conservative website Pajamas Media. Alas, he wasn't terribly impressed with his new colleagues. "I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting," Wurzelbacher said in the Israeli city of Sderot, where he was, from all appearances, reporting. "You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, 'Well, look at this atrocity,' well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."
Tomorrow, the national forecast, particularly in battleground states, looks overall to be pretty nice--sunny in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Florida, and Ohio--which should bode well for Obama and other Democrats.
Readers have been asking whether liberal PACs and 527s are hitting back. Well those affiliated with organized labor are, and hard.
Alan Brinkley--who is the provost and a professor of history at Columbia University, as well as a National Book Award-winning author--will be writing for us throughout the Republican convention.
