We estimate that a family affordability rule could initially lead to as many as 1.3 million more workers accessing exchange subsidies for themselves and their families than under a single affordability rule. If employees pay 50 percent of the premiums in the future, this number increases to 6 million.

Improved patient-focused measurement, while not perfect, could be profoundly enabling in the short term as well as beyond– but capturing this potential will require thoughtful science, involved patients, and inquisitive physicians, as well as the shared commitment to iterate and optimize around the common goal of improved health for real people.

Better-designed provider-level measurement can make the cost containment tools of differential reimbursement, high-performance tiered networks, valuebased benefit design, clinical re-engineering, and the responsible choices they offer more visible and effective.

Reviewing "The Myth of The Paperless Office" for the New Yorker in 2002, Malcolm Gladwell argued that if the computer had come first, and paper didn't exist, someone would have had to invent it.  Paper, it turns out, is a lot more useful than we typically appreciate.

If we are to improve health care, we need effective ways to measure how health care providers deliver care. Speakers at this conference will assess how existing physician performance measurement tools operate and how we can improve their accuracy, reliability, transparency, and usefulness. For example, both the Government Accountability Office...

An impact or outcome-based evaluation addresses the essential question of whether education and social programs are delivering the desired results in terms of person-referenced outcomes.

Of the many factors that make improving the health system difficult, few challenges are greater than the misty-eyed recollection – often from genuinely distinguished practitioners – of how great things used to be.  Doctors were highly regarded authority figures, pure and beloved, while patients were meek and grateful in the presence of such brilliance and expertise.

Although it was not even calculated until the 1960s, the "poverty rate" is now one of America"s most familiar--and politically significant--statistical indicators.