Journal of Clinical Investigation -- Critical: What we can do about the health-care crisis

Journal of Clinical Investigation -- Critical: What we can do about the health-care crisis:

The section on the proposed federal HEALTH bard, from a review of the Daschle Book, by Joseph White:

"Part Four explains that the Federal Health Board would operate within a reform context similar to proposals made by major Democratic candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign. Medicaid would be expanded; private health insurance would be made more broadly available through a system of subsidies and would be marketed through an open version of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP); an expanded version of Medicare would be made available to all Americans for purchase through the FEHBP; employers would be required to subsidize their employees’ coverage directly or make a contribution to the FEHBP insurance pool; and individuals would be required to purchase one of the coverage options (unless eligible for Medicaid), and their premium expenses would be subsidized by a refundable tax credit. The complexity of health policy is shown by all other decisions that would be left to the Federal Health Board. Among these would be defining the minimum benefit package (including parity for mental health care); regulating insurance marketing; standardizing medical records across all federal health care programs (including the Veterans Health Administration, Medicare, and Medicaid); and improving value in all federal programs through new quality measures, new methods of “paying for performance” (P4P), and approving or setting prices for new procedures based on cost-effectiveness research. Daschle argues that applying such reforms to the 100 million Americans (at a minimum) covered by the federal programs (including voluntary Medicare) would create “tremendous pressure on everybody else to follow suit”."

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