Expanding Access to Health Care

The U.S. health care system faces well-known problems: 47 million people without health insurance, rapidly rising costs that consume 16 percent of the country's economic output, and widely uneven quality of care. Even many people with coverage are experiencing serious problems paying for the rapidly rising costs of health care and insurance.This book - a joint product of the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Academy of Social Science - undertakes a sweeping analysis of the management and administrative issues that arise in expanding health care coverage. The book identifies the core administrative functions that need to be performed in assuring access to health coverage, describes how these functions are performed at present and under proposed alternatives, draws lessons from experience in the U.S. and abroad, and assesses suggested administrative approaches designed to facilitate the improvement and expansion of health care coverage.Adequate health care is one of today's most crucial domestic policy concerns. "Expanding Access to Health Care" is designed to bring together in one place some of the best thinking on the subject, not as an exercise in advocacy, but rather to lay out the issues in a balanced way so that policymakers, researchers, and citizens can better understand the complex details of health care reform. Introduction Part I. Management Issues and Policies in Health Insurance Market Reforms 1. Restructuring Health Insurance Markets 2. Designing Regional Health Markets 3. Creating a Level Playing Field for Public and Private Plans 4. Regulating Private Health Insurance 5. Paying One’s Fair Share for Health Coverage and Care 6. Refiguring Federalism: Nation and State in Health Reform’s Next Round 7. Recent Changes in Dutch Health Insurance: Individual Mandate or Social Insurance? Part II. Administering Health Insurance Programs and Reforms 8. Administering a Medicaid-plus-Tax-Credits Initiative 9. Administering Health Insurance Mandates 10. Designing Administrative Organizations for Health Reform 11. Individual Health Insurance Plan Information: Too Much and Too Little Part III. Controlling Costs Under Health Care Reform 12. Controlling Health Care Costs 13. Simplifying Administration of Health Insurance Part IV. Using Performance Management to Enhance Health Care Reform 14. Management and Performance of Federal Health Care Programs 15. Performance-Based Management Under Ryan White: The BPHC Initiative Part V. Empirical Studies 16. Expanding Access to Health Care for Hispanic Construction Workers and Their Children 17. Expanding Access to Health Insurance for Children: The State Children’s Health Insurance Program, 1997–2007 18. Did Medicaid/SCHIP Crowd Out Private Insurance Among Low-Income Children?