Health care is, broadly speaking a local good, just like Senator Tip O’Neill used to say about politics: that “all politics is local.” Secretary of Health and Human Kathlees Sebelius launched the website The Heatlh Care Status Quo on the HealthReform.Gov portal, profiling each of the 50 States and their current level of health care [...]

I was reminded by a short story in the Kansas City Star over the weekend about a report from the Congressional Budget Office published in November 2007. In The Long-Term Outlook for Health Care Spending, the CBO forecasts that health spending – including Medicare, Medicaid, and all other spending — will consume the entire U.S. [...]

A powerful, simple, nudge has been discovered by researchers at Wharton’s Leonard Davis Institute — it’s directly paying people to be healthy. Readers of Health Populi should already know about P4P, pay-for-performance, being adopted in Medicare and by other payers to incent health providers to provide health care that demonstrates health outcomes. In this health [...]

Here’s the recipe for making a health-oriented consumer-facing health decision tool that gets traction: the secrets in the sauce that get health citizens to use self-care tools are trust, usability, and branding. It also takes luck in timing and, by the way, helps to come from outside of the health industry. For sustained success, the [...]