"The Role of Consumer Copayments for Health Care: Lessons From the RAND Health Insurance Experiment and Beyond," Kaiser Family Foundation: The report by Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reviews data from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment to offer insights into current health policy debates about appropriate levels of cost sharing. The RAND experiment, conducted in the 1970s, randomly assigned families to health plans with different ranges of coinsurance and followed them for three to five years to determine how coinsurance levels affected their health and use of medical services. The Kaiser Family Foundation study found that higher coinsurance rates reduce use of health services and health care spending; that coinsurance plans did not have adverse consequences for individuals of average health and income when compared with a plan with no coinsurance; and that the health of high-risk people, especially those with low incomes, there were health benefits when they were enrolled in plans with no coinsurance (Kaiser Family Foundation release, 10/30).
"Health Reform: Time for a Wake-Up Call," Health Affairs blog: While surveys show that health care is a "top personal and family economic worry," health care is "playing a relatively minor role in determining the outcome of the 2006 midterm election, " Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard University School of Public Health and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, write in the Health Affairs blog. Few presidential hopefuls are mentioning health care and other issues, such as the war in Iraq, "are winning voters' attention," according to Altman and Blendon. "In the early nineties there was no war in Iraq, no 9/11, and no lingering memory of Hurricane Katrina to capture voters' attention," they write, adding that Pennsylvania Senate candidate Harris Wofford "demonstrated for the first time that a candidate for national office could tap into the public's underlying concern about health insurance and health care costs to help win an election." They write that "the national agenda does not just bubble up from the bottom but is driven by political leaders and media coverage from the top." They conclude that "for health to compete more effectively with other issues on the national agenda, it will take leadership in the form of visible political candidates willing to champion the issue, and the media attention that follows" (Altman/Blendon, Health Affairs blog, 10/30). The Health Affairs blog, launched earlier this month, aims to provide "a timely opportunity to extend the kind of debates journals have long presented in letters to the editor, but in a new online medium and to a more far-reaching community," according to Health Affairs Editor John Iglehart (Iglehart, Health Affairs blog, 10/5).
"Reprinted with permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.
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