Thinking About Clinical Outcomes in Medicaid

Thinking About Clinical Outcomes in Medicaid

As Medicaid expands in scope and influence, it is evolving toward being a "purchaser" of quality health care. This commentary discusses measurement and incentivization of clinical outcomes in Medicaid. Advantages and disadvantages of outcome versus process measures are discussed. Distinctions are drawn between the roles of Medicare and Medicaid, including the implications of the growth in Medic...

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

There's something about Medicaid.

In the thirty-seven years since its creation, Medicaid has grown in terms of whom it covers and what it costs. Current rates of Medicaid enrollment and cost growth are high relative to state budget capacity, but not by historical standards. The current Medicaid fiscal crisis is a result of weak state fiscal conditions and the gradual accretion of populations and services covered by Medicaid. St...