If This Was a Pill, You’d Do Anything To Get It

A Medicare experiment is facing possible shutdown, despite its proven effectiveness. The secret? It’s nurses making frequent house calls to those with chronic diseases:

“But Health Quality Partners, with its emphasis on continuous nurse-to-patient contact, did work. Of the 15 programs, four improved patient outcomes without increasing costs. Only HQP improved patient outcomes while cutting costs. So Medicare extended it again and again — now it’s the only program still running under the demo. But Medicare has notified Coburn that it intends to end HQP’s funding in June.

“Medicare’s official explanation is carefully bureaucratic. ‘The authority that CMS had to conduct this specific demonstration, which predated the health care law, did not allow us to make the program permanent and limited our ability to expand it further,’ says Emma Sandoe, a spokeswoman for the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services. ‘As we design new models and demonstrations, we are integrating lessons from this experience into those designs.'”

Author: Ezra Klein
Source: Washington Post
Published: Apr 28, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,336 words)

The Unpersuaded

The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass:

“To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. She found that a President’s powers of persuasion were strong, but only within his own party. Nearly four thousand of the votes were of the mission-to-Mars variety—they should have found support among both Democrats and Republicans. Absent a President’s involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the divide was even sharper.”

Author: Ezra Klein
Source: New Yorker
Published: Mar 12, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,076 words)

Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause

Indeed, the greatest confidence man of the last few years, at least going by Suskind’s definition, was not Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner, but Barack Obama. Being a confidence man is almost in the job description of the insurgent presidential candidate. Having not been president before, you must, by definition, ask the American people for a trust you have not earned.

Author: Ezra Klein
Published: Nov 24, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,573 words)

You Have No Idea What Health Costs

If You Did, You Might Just Want Real Reform

Author: Ezra Klein
Source: Washington Post
Published: Sep 20, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,448 words)