A primer on health reform

I've been meaning to blog about health reform forever, since that's what I do with my days. But the issue is so big, it's been hard to know where to start. But someone recently asked me for a primer on the issues, so the rest of this post is lifted verbatim from the email I sent him.

One of the challenges in the health reform debate is that the system is such a mess, nearly everyone who works in health policy agrees that we should do SOMETHING, no matter how imperfect. So nearly every reputable source I'm going to give you is going to be in favor of any legislation that comes out of a Democratic Congress.

The other challenge is that until the past few weeks, the proposals for how to make all this happen have been vague, and everyone favors reform but doesn't necessarily care that much about the details. Also, legislative analysis apparently bores audiences, so there's not a lot of specifics on the different legislation for a non-policy audience.

With those provisos, here's my best attempt at a list:

Eight Myths About Health Care Reform - From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a good primer on the disinformation

In Search of Health Reform - An interactive feature that gives a good overview of the problem and the proposed solutions.

The Experts vs. The Public on Health Reform - The CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit health policy foundation, takes on how health policy experts view the issues, versus how the public views the issues.

This is the point where I take a break to say that I am a health policy wonk, and that the information I added below might take you into minutiae that you really just don't care about.

Not Enough Audacity - Paul Krugman makes the case for a public plan.

Fiscal Suicide Ahead - And David Brooks argues why we need cost containment, and why we're unlikely to get it.

The Cost Conundrum - A really influential article about the structural problems that Brooks is talking about above.

The Risk Pool - This is an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2006. It's not really central to the issues being debated right now, but I think it provides a compelling framework for how we think about risk and insurance. Anything risky is best spread out among as many people as possible. This means that buying health insurance is harder and harder the fewer people are in your "risk pool". It's why we have Medicare (old people are terrible risks) and why people want a mandate that everyone have health insurance (more people spreading the risk), and so this issue is what underlies a lot of the fundamentals of health reform.

Finally, I tag bookmarks on Delicious with healthreform when I remember.