Description: A proposal to reform the health care provider payment system through: a national fee schedule, shifting more reimbursements to primary care providers, better integration of hospital & physician fees, evidence based care, pay for performance, and a better provider risk sharing mechanism.

Description: Panelists discuss major reforms of health care financing and delivery systems around the world. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: Discussion of recent developments in the taxation of noncoordinated benefits such as fixed indemnity, hospital indemnity, and specified disease insurance policies. Developments include a recent Chief Counsel Advice Memorandum and proposed triagency rulemaking that would impact non coordinated benefits.

Description: This paper provides an outline of three potential initiatives that may be undertaken by the government and the private sector. The first initiative aims at reducing the cost of health care at the provider level. The second initiative provides a means to improve the quality of health care. The third initiative creates a constructive basis for identifying medical best practices to enhance quality.

Description: This paper discussed providing consumers of medical care with transparent and comparable price and quality information to enable them to make economically optimal decisions.

Description: A proposal to address provider payment issues by gradually moving to accountable care organizations. Capitations would be risk-adjusted, non-capitated costs would be covered by hospitalization fund and stoploss, incentives for quality & effective preventive care would be tied to the amount remaining in the fund, and government involvement would be through incentives rather than mandate.

Description: The editors of Health Watch have made health care reform the focus of the Sepctember 2009 issue, and provide an introduction to the issue's contents.

Description: Summary of results of a 2010 Health Section survey of actuaries and Medicare population, on ways to bend the cost trend curve downward. Issues included transparency, quality measures, fraud and abuse, provider payment, malpractice, medical errors, consumer education, and the pros and cons of employer-sponsored coverage.

Description: Shannon Brownlee shares her perspectives on the current health care crisis, including: inconsistent treatment patterns across providers and geographic regions, providers lacking evidence-based guidelines, the need for better independent clinical research to establish those guidelines, and the limits to consumerism's potential to fix the crisis.

Description: An overview of the issues behind reimbursing providers on a bundled or packaged basis. The article presents the potential advantages offered by the proponents as well as the criticisms and obstacles to implementing this type of payment system.