An excerpt from Balancing The Budget is a Progressive Priority.

It is our cultural fear of death and inability to discuss the limits of medicine to forestall death that enables the politics of health reform to be so potent.

When I did a post-doctoral fellowship in England in the mid-1990s, a professor I met who had lived in the U.S. explained to me why he thought health policy discussions in that nation …

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If we ever slow health care cost inflation to a sustainable pace, it will be because we learn how to ask 3 simple questions when thinking about a medical treatment.

• Does it improve quality of life for the patient?
• Does it extend the patient’s life?
• How much does it cost?

Asking the questions are of course much simpler than figuring out the …

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While the rhetoric around health reform has been incendiary from day one, in policy terms, a compromise between Democrats and Republicans using the outline of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has always been available. The two primary problems with the health care system are costs and lack of coverage. The ACA does pretty well on the second, and is a start on the first, but much more is needed. It …

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