Description: Discussion of direct primary care and how it helps with several challenges in health care today. DPC improves care coordination, improves outcomes, improves doctor and patient satisfaction, and reduces spending. DPC successes promote the view that primary care should not be covered by insurance; rather, it should be paid for directly.

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: This session is about rationing health care. From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 18, No. 4A.

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: Summary of pending legislation in response to looming crisis in the Long Term Vare market.

Description: This article presents a view of health care as an economic system, suggests a framework for classifying current criticisms of the system, and offers references for further reading.

Description: An economics professor and a health care consumer advocate weigh in on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, including implementation issues, directions for the future and what role actuaries shoudl take.

Description: Open meeting of the Society's Health Benefit Systems Practice Advancement Committee and Health Section Council, as well as the American Academy of Actuaries' Health Practice Council. The three committees review ongoing projects in the Health Practice area. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

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: Article from The Actuary regarding the medical malpractice crisis. could a macro system be the answer to a reduction in medical malpractice costs? Information in this article points in that direction.