Posts by Gail Wilensky, Ph.D.

After focusing on healthcare reform for most of 2009, the House and the Senate are in the final stages of reconciling the differences among their various bills both within and between the two houses of Congress. Although it is too early to begin the post- mortems that will surely follow the final bill’s passage, a…

Now that healthcare reform legislation is the law of the land—at least version 1.0 of healthcare reform—the real work starts. As is the case for most new legislation, rules and regulations will need to be developed that implement the many aspects of the legislation that are not completely developed in the statutory language. Many of…

In early August, the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds released their annual report about the current and projected status of the programs. Normally, the trustees release this report in the spring. However, they decided to delay their 2010 report by several months so they could incorporate into it the effects of…

As anyone who has followed the lengthy debate around the passage of the Affordable Care Act knows, comparative effectiveness research (CER) is now part of healthcare reform. As someone who has been pressing the importance of CER as an important building block toward “treating better and spending smarter,” I regard its inclusion in the legislation,…

With the election behind us and a split government ahead, the future of the nation’s health care remains very much in question. For months before the election, many of the newly elected Republicans made “repeal and replace” their mantra, and it is widely expected that legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act will be at the…

Almost a year after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, there continues to be massive uncertainty associated with what the law will mean for both the provider and the consumer communities. To a certain extent, this uncertainty is understandable, given the sheer scope of the legislation and countless new rules and regulations that…

After a two-and-a-half-month delay, the long-awaited regulations for accountable care organizations (ACOs) were released on March 31. Policy wonks, health lawyers, and hospital consultants were so eager to read what the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) had written that they almost crashed the website the afternoon it was released. Now that the dust…

The Social Security trustees released their annual report in May, and the news was not good for Medicare. The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund, which last year had been projected to remain solvent until 2029, is now expected to run out of money by 2024. The five-year reduction insolvency is primarily attributable to the slow…

The CMS actuaries published their annual estimates of health- care spending and projections of future spending at the end of July. Their report contains good news and bad news—depending on your predilections and your views of the coming decade. Healthcare spending in 2010 grew 3.9 percent, reaching $2.6 trillion. This growth rate is just below…

As states continue to struggle with their budgets, controlling spending on Medicaid looms as one of their most difficult challenges. The states are coming to realize that future efforts must focus not just on slowing Medicaid spending, but also on improving the value it delivers. This is not to suggest that getting the greatest possible…