The real action in health care

It's not taking place in the White House or Congress. The show to watch is the boisterous, free-market affair, precipitated by employers fed up with rising medical costs, and carried on by insurers and HMOs scrapping for turf.     

Assessing the impact of AIDS on the growth path of the Malawian economy

More than 1% of people of sub-Saharan Africa aged 15-49 years are infected with HIV, with over half likely to develop AIDS in the next decade. As rates of HIV infection continue to climb, there will be staggering financial consequences to bear in the years ahead in terms of high medical treatment costs and crippled macroeconomies. The authors employ a modified Solow growth model to simulate the impact of the AIDS epidemic on output capacity and other key macroeconomic aggregates in Malawi. They compare a counterfactual no-AIDS scenario to medium and extreme AIDS projections and find that average real GDP growth over the 1985-2010 period will be 0.2-0.3 percentage points lower in the medium case and 1.2-1.5% lower in the extreme case relative to the no-AIDS case. The size of the economy by 2010 will therefore be reduced from a real GDP of 5.03 billion (constant 1985) Kwacha without AIDS to 4.81-4.77 and 3.80-3.46 billion Kwacha in the medium and extreme scenarios, respectively.     

Guiding it through

Some relatively little known Members of Congress and an even less visible group of aides are playing important behind-the-scenes roles in the health care reform debate.     

Stress fractures

President Clinton has lambasted "special interests" for opposing his health care reform proposal. But interest groups are under enormous pressure, and many are badly splintered as Congress takes up the issue. And you can't always judge what they want by what they say.     

The spoils of reform

The nation's most prestigious medical schools and teaching hospitals like the idea of comprehensive health care reform. And little wonder: Thanks to aggressive lobbying and some powerful friends, they seem to have gotten just about everything on their wish list--and then some--in the leading reform plans now under consideration on Capitol Hill.