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Designing Administrative Organizations for Health Reform
Many proposals for expanding health coverage involve the creation of organizations to produce information on comparative effectiveness, make coverage decisions, manage the marketplace for health insurance, or offer a public health insurance plan. Designing Administrative Organizations for Health Reform describes proposals to create new entities or agencies as part of a reformed health coverage system, catalogs the major types of federal executive agencies and non-governmental entities, and considers some of the issues involved in choosing an appropriate organizational design. It concludes that organizations that use governmental powers and funds and make public policy need to be accountable as well as effective.
Re-Figuring Federalism: Nation and State in Health Reform's Next Round
Health reform must recognize the extensive role of states in U.S. health policy and reconcile national consistency with sub-national diversity. Re-Figuring Federalism: Nation and State in Health Reform's Next Round draws lessons both from federal-state relations in Medicaid and from the experiences of three other federal countries—Canada, Germany and Switzerland. It concludes that universal health coverage is compatible with a federal system, but that the federal government needs to establish central rules of the game.
Designing a Mixed Public and Private System for the Health Insurance Market
Designing a Mixed Public and Private System for the Health Insurance Market considers design features of a health care reform proposal that would offer a government-run health insurance plan alongside competing private plans in a government-run insurance exchange. The Medicare program provides a practical guide to the problems and opportunities offered by such a mixed public and private system. Since both public and private plans have inherent advantages and disadvantages, both plans can be offered on a relatively level playing field. Among the items to be considered in creating a level playing field are the benefit package, advertising and consumer information, risk selection and risk adjustment, the choice environment, default enrollment, provider payment rates, and the administrative structure.
Cost Containment and Coverage Expansion
Choices about covering the uninsured have implications for the feasibility of different approaches for controlling health care costs, and vice versa. In practice, some combinations may work together better than others and the interplay of different approaches to coverage expansion and cost containment is the focus of Cost Containment and Coverage Expansion. It begins with a brief review of whether coverage expansion and cost controls must go hand-in-hand. It then lays out the menus of commonly proposed coverage approaches and available cost control measures and considers how the two might go together.
Role of Health Insurance Regulation
The Regulation of Private Health Insurance examines the current role of health insurance regulation and the role that it could play in a reformed health care system. It begins by exploring the nature of health insurance and alternative approaches to regulation. It next considers the current status of state and federal health insurance regulation, both describing the development of health insurance regulation and examining arguments in support of and in opposition to regulatory interventions. Finally, it considers the kind of insurance regulation that will be needed in a reformed health care system, as well as the question of whether authority for insurance regulation should be placed at the federal or state level. It concludes that the best approach would be to develop national standards for health insurance enforced primarily at the state level.
