Employers and policymakers are looking for ways to encourage competition among health plans, thus lowering costs and improving quality. Employers hope to foster competition among health plans by creating standardized measures of quality that supplement the traditional benefits and cost information employees use to compare plans and make choices. This DataWatch examines employees' interest in standardized measures of plan performance. Results from a survey of Massachusetts state employees show that cost and benefit information receive high rankings, but certain plan performance information does not.E MPLOYERS THAT USE standardized health plan performance information to compare the quality and cost of plans they purchase may want to pass this information along to their employees. Whether employees will find plan performance information useful in comparing and choosing health plans, however, is largely unknown.In this DataWatch, we present the results of a pilot study of employees' information needs and discuss the implications of the results. The purpose of the study was to answer the following questions: What information is essential to the most employees in choosing health plans? What information is essential to the fewest employees? What information do employees say is not useful or somewhat useful in choosing health plans? 1 How do employees'
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) has led to a surge of patients requiring post‐acute care. In order to support federal, state and corporate planning, we offer a four‐stage regionally oriented approach to achieving optimal systemwide resource allocation across a region's post‐acute service settings and providers over time. In the first stage, the post‐acute care system must, to the extent possible, help relieve acute hospitals of non‐COVID‐19 patients to create as much inpatient capacity as possible over the surge period. In the second stage after the initial surge as subsided, post‐acute providers must protect vulnerable populations from COVID‐19, prepare treat‐in‐place protocols for non‐COVID‐19 admissions, and create and formalize COVID‐19 specific settings. In the third stage after a vaccine has been developed or an effective prophylactic option is available, post‐acute care providers must assist with distribution and administration of vaccinations and prophylaxis, develop strategies to deliver non‐COVID‐19 related medical care, and begin to transition to the post‐COVID‐19 landscape. In the final stage, we must create health advisory bodies to review post‐acute sector's response, identify opportunities to improve performance going forward, and develop a pandemic response plan for post‐acute care providers. J Am Geriatr Soc 68:1150–1154, 2020.
The overlap between the population served and the services provided by state programs and Medicare has given states and providers an opportunity to leverage Federal dollars in lieu of state program dollars. As the Federal government attempts to control expenditure growth, policy-makers must be mindful of how state actions can influence the level and type of Federal expenditure.
paper was to take only a limited first step toward realizing a market-oriented health policy. Thus, my principal goal was to demonstrate the truly serious policy mess that our political and legal institutions have created by systematically ignoring the fact of scarcity and substituting feel-good politics and jurisprudence for rigorous analysis.Epstein questions, however, my suggestion that such a demonstration might lay a basis for productive high-level discussions under
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