Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report Feature Highlights Recent Blog Entries

Main Category: Medicare / Medicaid / SCHIP
Also Included In: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance;  Women's Health / Gynecology;  Public Health
Article Date: 20 Apr 2009 - 1:00 PDT

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"Blog Watch" offers readers a roundup of health policy-related blog posts.

Igor Volsky of the Center for American Progress Action Fund's Wonk Room looks at a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in which former acting CMS Administrator Kerry Weems and former HHS Assistant Secretary Benjamin Sasse argue that "the administrative expenses of private insurance plans represent money well spent for their members." Volsky disagrees, noting that the "breakdowns of how private plans allocate their administrative dollars are unavailable and Weems and Sasse's argument is a hypothesis at best."

Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk looks at two recent items on health care from The Nation and "60 Minutes," saying that the pieces "have shown what's wrong with U.S. health care in no uncertain terms."

TIE of the Finance Buff offers a primer on fee-for-service Medicare.

John Joseph Leppard IV of Healthcare Manumission explains why he thinks a public plan option would be unfair competition, saying, "Like a wrestler with the WWF behind him, the government option is almost always the winner; but that doesn't necessarily mean there won't be a whole lot of struggling and acrobatics before all is said and done."

Henry Stern of Insure Blog discusses a new study that showed a DNA test could be more effective than annual Pap tests for women and whether it could reduce health costs for women.

Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review Online's The Corner defends criticism of his New York Times opinion piece on health reform.

Paul Testa of the New America Foundation's New Health Dialogue looks at HHS Secretary-nominee Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' (D-Kan.) written responses to questions from the Senate Finance Committee.

Jacob Hacker on the New Republic's The Treatment looks at a new report from the Lewin Group on public plan options and says that because of the way Lewin modeled a public plan, the report "has basically nothing to say about the effects of proposals similar to mine or Senator Baucus' or President Obama's campaign plan on the distribution of public and private coverage."

Glenn Laffel of Pizaazz hosts the most recent edition of Health Wonk Review, a biweekly compendium of more than two dozen health policy, infrastructure, insurance, technology and managed care bloggers. A different participant's blog hosts each issue.

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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