This article examines the possibilities for health care reform in the 111th Congress. It uses a simple model of policy making to analyze the failure of Congress to pass the Clinton health plan in 1993-1994. It concludes that the factors that created gridlock in the 103rd Congress are likely to have a similar impact in the present.

Most of us agree on what’s wrong with our health care system: spiraling costs, millions without insurance or millions more with inadequate coverage, a growing fear that the health care system will not be there when we need it, and the realization that despite the highest expenditures in the world and leading-edge medical technologies we still rank below most other industrialized nations on many...

How to control the increasing health expenditures is a common problem in the developed countries. The main causes of this increase are ageing of the society and medical innovation. The UK government has introduced a market oriented health reform in order to balance the increasing expenditures and the quality of care. For example, they have introduced the GP Fundholding, Private Financial Initia...

BACKGROUND The Ministry of Health and Medical Education of Iran, along with the country movement towards achievements of Iran's Vision 2025 put compilation of the health system reform plan on its agenda. In this article, we are trying to show the method we used for developing this plan and how this method considered the general condition of the country along with maintaining the standards of sc...

In 2010, the United States adopted its first-ever comprehensive set of health system reforms in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Implementation of the law, though politically contentious and controversial, has now reached a stage where reversal of most elements of the law is no longer feasible. The controversial portions of the law that expand affordable health insurance coverage to most U.S. cit...

CAPLAN: I know of no evidence that the citizens of nations with universal coverage “overutilize” health care services. Some of these systems tightly regulate access to specialty care by requiring referrals from primary care physicians, so they use gate-keeping to discourage overuse. Others strictly control expenditures on high technology and on expensive drugs; you can’t overutilize resources t...

1 Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 2 UNICEF Office for China, Beijing, People’s Republic of China, 3 Department of Health Policy and Administration, School of Public Health, Peking University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China, 4 Department of Health Statistics and Social Medicine, Fudan University School of Public Health, Shanghai, People’s R...