Health affairs
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The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which was enacted twenty years ago, covers uninsured children who do not qualify for Medicaid but lack access to affordable coverage. Together these safety-net programs have boosted the health insurance coverage rate among US children to historic levels, exceeding 95 percent of children in 2015. ⋯ Congress has yet to act to extend CHIP funding beyond September 30, 2017, when the current appropriation expires. State and federal policy makers should act now to preserve the foundation of coverage currently in place while striving to ensure that every child in the United States has health coverage.
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We investigated whether drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) through expedited review have offered larger health gains, compared to drugs approved through conventional review processes. We identified published estimates of additional health gains (measured in quality-adjusted life-years, or QALYs) associated with drugs approved in the period 1999-2012 through expedited (seventy-six drugs) versus conventional (fifty-nine) review processes. ⋯ We also found that, compared to drugs not included in the same program, greater gains were provided by drugs in the priority review (0.175 versus 0.007 QALYs), accelerated approval (0.370 versus 0.031 QALYs), and fast track (0.254 versus 0.014 QALYs) programs. Our analysis suggests that the FDA has prioritized drugs that offer the largest health gains.
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The extent to which recent large increases in hospitals' adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems can be attributed to the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 is uncertain and debated. Because only short-term acute care hospitals were eligible for the act's meaningful-use incentive program, we used national hospital data to examine the differential effect of HITECH on EHR adoption among eligible and ineligible hospitals in the periods before (2008-10) and after (2011-15) implementation of the program. ⋯ Ineligible hospitals experienced much smaller annual increases of 0.1 percent in the pre period and 3.3 percent in the post period, a significant difference-in-differences of 7.9 percentage points. Our results support the argument that recent gains in EHR adoption can be attributed specifically to HITECH, which suggests that the act could serve as a model for ways to drive the adoption of other valuable technologies.
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In 2014 the World Health Organization called for palliative care to be integrated as an essential element of the health care continuum. Yet in 2017 US palliative care services are found largely in hospitals, and hospice care, which is delivered primarily in the home, is limited to people who are dying soon. The majority of Americans with a serious illness are not dying; are living at home, in assisted living facilities, or in nursing homes; and have limited access to palliative care. ⋯ The lack of policy supports for palliative care contributes to preventable suffering and low-value care. In this article we outline the need for a national palliative care strategy to ensure reliable access to high-quality palliative care for Americans with serious medical illnesses. We review approaches employed by other countries, list the participants needed to develop and implement an actionable strategy, and identify analogous US national health initiatives to inform a process for implementing the strategy.