Thursday, March 11, 2004

Medicaid's Federal-State Partnership: Alternatives for Improving Financial Integrity - Summary of Issues, Approaches, and Alternatives for Reform
A report in Adobe Acrobat format from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured - "In this report ... Penny Thompson, former deputy director for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations, used existing models from the private sector and other government programs to assess Medicaid’s financial management and to develop options for improvement. This table summarizes the report’s findings."  
  

A Quiet Revolution: Law As An Agent Of Health System Change
Editorial article in the latest Health Affairs - "This paper considers law’s impact on health system change. Federal courts and state regulators have remade the rules of the medical marketplace, restricting the methods available to managed care organizations to control costs. Legal conflict, however, has had a larger effect through its influence on market actors’ perceptions and expectations. In anticipation of adverse legal outcomes and in response to consumers’ and investors’ anxiety, health plans changed business strategies, backing away from aggressive cost management. We conclude with four lessons about law’s role in the health sphere—lessons that stress the power of legal conflict to shape perceptions and to thereby change behavior before legal change occurs."