The coverage, cost, and quality problems of the U.S. health care system are evident. Sustainable health care reform must go beyond financing expanded access to care to substantially changing the organization and delivery of care. The FRESH-Thinking Project held a series of workshops during which physicians, health policy experts, health insurance executives, business leaders, hospital administrators, economists, and others who represent diverse perspectives came together. This group agreed that the following 8 recommendations are fundamental to successful reform:

1. Replace the current fee-for-service payment system with a payment system that encourages and rewards innovation in the efficient delivery of quality care. The new payment system should invest in the development of outcome measures to guide payment.
2. Establish a securely funded, independent agency to sponsor and evaluate research on the comparative effectiveness of drugs, devices, and other medical interventions.
3. Simplify and rationalize federal and state laws and regulations to facilitate organizational innovation, support care coordination, and streamline financial and administrative functions.
4. Develop a health information technology infrastructure with national standards of interoperability to promote data exchange.
5. Create a national health database with the participation of all payers, delivery systems, and others who own health care data. Agree on methods to make deidentified information from this database on clinical interventions, patient outcomes, and costs available to researchers.
6. Identify revenue sources, including a cap on the tax exclusion of employer-based health insurance, to subsidize health care coverage with the goal of insuring all Americans.
7. Create state or regional insurance exchanges to pool risk, so that Americans without access to employer-based or other group insurance could obtain a standard benefits package through these exchanges. Employers should also be allowed to participate in these exchanges for their employees' coverage.
8. Create a health coverage board with broad stakeholder representation to determine and periodically update the affordable standard benefit package available through state or regional insurance exchanges.

Objectives From 1994 to the year 2000 the government of Puerto Rico implemented a health care reform which included the mandatory enrollment of the entire Medicaid eligible population under Medicaid managed care (MMC) plans. This study assessed the effect of MMC on the use, initiation, utilization, and adequacy of prenatal care services over the reform period.

Methods Using the vital records of all infants born alive in Puerto Rico from the year 1995-2000, a series of bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to assess the effect of insurance status (traditional Medicaid, MMC, private insurance and uninsured) on prenatal care utilization patterns. In order to assess the potential influence of selection bias in generating the health insurance assignments, propensity scores (PS) were estimated and entered into the multivariate regressions.

Results MMC had a generally positive effect on the frequency and adequacy of prenatal care when compared with the experience of women covered by traditional Medicaid. However, the PS analyses suggested that self-selection may have generated part of the observed beneficial effects. Also, MMC reduced but did not eliminate the gap in the amount and adequacy of prenatal care received by pregnant women covered by Medicaid when compared to their counterparts covered by private insurance.

Conclusions The Puerto Rico Health Reform to implement MMC for pregnant women was associated with a general improvement in prenatal care utilization. However, continued progress will be necessary for women covered by Medicaid to reach prenatal care utilization levels experienced by privately insured women.

Fuchs argues that health reform must encompass the Four Cs in order to succeed: coverage, cost control, coordinated care and choice. While details are certainly important, Fuchs writes, Congress and the Obama Administration must remember that "God is in the essentials." Without the essentials, no reform plan can succeed.

In late 2006, the Chinese government appointed a high-level inter-ministerial commission—composed of fourteen government agencies, co-chaired by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Health—to develop a blueprint for China’s healthcare system. One party to that process, China’s Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC), has developed a program of cooperation with its U.S. counterpart, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). To provide input to policymaking, representatives of CIRC, NAIC, private insurers in China and the United States, as well as Chinese and American scholars of health insurance gathered in Yichang, Hubei, PRC, on 18-19 June 2007, for a joint seminar on the role of commercial health insurance in the Chinese and U.S. healthcare systems.

The first section of this field report provides a brief description of China’s health care reforms in the past decades. The second section highlights the progress and challenges to date in developing commercial health insurance in China, and the final section summarizes the recommendations that the NAIC Commissioners provided to CIRC in 2007 at this critical juncture in China’s health policy reforms.