Public and private purchasers can shift the focus of the health care system from managing the delivery of medical services to improving health. We report on the efforts of the Pacific Business Group on Health to include health promotion and disease prevention in its definition of health care value, to pay health plans based on their performance in providing appropriate preventive care, and to e...

Boost quality and outcomes through patient empowerment. How? By making claims information available to health plan members as well as physicians. At least one organization is making it happen with the help of a Web-based communications strategy.

An employer-enforced individual mandate has some substantial advantages over the mixed employer and individual mandate embodied in the Clinton administration's proposed health plan. Economic reasoning strongly suggests that almost all of the cost of an employer mandate will fall on workers and that in any case the incidence of an individual mandate is the same as that of an employer mandate. Ho...

This paper focuses on the relationship between metropolitan and regional health planning based on the processes of regionalization and the Pact for Health in the Baixada Santista Metropolitan Area, São Paulo State, Brazil. The method used was a case study in two stages, namely during initial implementation of the Pact for Health (2007) and the Regional Administration Committees (CGR) and in 201...