With a lot of attention focused on the potential for national health care reform and the raucous town hall meetings held by various members of Congress, it is important to remember that there are three substantive changes to the Federal Ethics in Physician Self-Referrals Act (known as the “Stark Law”) scheduled to take effect on October 1, 2009. Physicians and hospitals should review their join...

As national health care reform advances, increasing attention is being paid to the adequacy of existing resources to meet health care needs. Do we have the right mix of providers and facilities? Are they located and organized efficiently? These persistent questions are especially relevant to the provision of emergency care, in which timely access can save lives. This Issue Brief describes the f...

BACKGROUND Healthcare reforms initiated in the early 2000s in Québec involved the implementation of new modes of primary healthcare (PHC) delivery and the creation of Health and Social Services Centers (HSSCs) to support it. The objective of this article is to assess and explain the degree of PHC organizational change achieved following these reforms. METHODS We conducted two surveys of PHC o...

BY JEFF TIEMAN Mr. Tiemtm is director, Covering a Nation, Catholic Health Association, Washington, D.C. CHA's Our Vision For U.S. Health Care has been a big hit. People from around the ministry — and, increasingly, outside of it — are requesting and promoting the document, which names values and principles that should guide future reform efforts. As we take the next steps toward a health care s...

Expensive and steadily rising health care costs without a concomitant increase in quality have generated a search for solutions to fund health care in the United States. Recent health care reforms and proposals on the agenda have spurred debate about alternative payment plans for health care. Much of the talk centers on imaging, which is a fast-growing and expensive component of health care. Va...

So much of what is happening in health care today is eerily similar to what was happening in the mid1990s. If that period were a movie, we would have called it Capitation, and this current feature would be called Return of Capitation. At the end of the first, the dead monster’s eyes would begin to glow again faintly, letting the audience know that a sequel would be a real possibility. Now he’s ...

The present study examines the relationship between racial prejudice and reactions to President Barack Obama and his policies. Before the 2008 election, participants’ levels of implicit and explicit anti-Black prejudice were measured. Over the following days and months, voting behavior, attitudes toward Obama, and attitudes toward Obama’s health care reform plan were assessed. Controlling for e...

The interest in quality management in health care has increased in the last decades as the financial crises in most health systems generated the need for solutions to contain costs while maintaining quality of care. In Germany the development of quality management procedures has been closely linked with health care reforms. Starting in the early nineties quality management issues gained momentu...

The passage of federal healthcare reform legislation, in combination with other factors, makes it likely that the next few years will be a major period of consolidation for healthcare organizations. This article examines the seven key forces reshaping healthcare delivery--from insurance industry consolidation to cost inflation to the increasing gap between financially strong and struggling prov...