INSIDE STORY

Led by House Speaker John Boehner, many Republicans and other critics of last year’s health care reform legislation describe it as a “job-killer bill” that will eliminate somewhere between 650,000 and 1.6 million jobs and waste multi-millions of dollars of taxpayer money with no measurable improvement of health care and no reasonable return on investment.
Led by President Obama, many Democrats and other supporters of the bill hail it as “landmark legislation” that will lower health care costs while providing better health care to more people in a more efficient manner while eliminating at most 150,000 low-paying jobs and possibly adding up to 1 million high-paying jobs.

The theoretically neutral Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the bill’s net cost, number of jobs lost or gained and impact on the nation’s health care as somewhere in the middle of the extremes proffered by the politicians.

Just about everyone agrees, however, that the votes are not there in this congress to repeal the bill, but at the very least it needs to be “taken apart piece by piece” (according to its critics) or “tweaked” (according to its proponents). And last I checked, two judges had ruled the legislation constitutional and two had ruled it unconstitutional.

Needless to say, the health care reform debate will continue, which brings us to this month’s cover story (“The ongoing battle over health care reform” by Doug Samuelson, page 24). Whatever you may think about the merits of the health care bill, as Samuelson points out, it’s certainly complicated (2,000 pages worth) and offers a target-rich environment for operations researchers, management scientists and analysts of all persuasions.

Among those issues the article addresses: the effect of the coverage mandate; the effect of eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions; the effect on small businesses; employment and entrepreneurship effects; tax effects; rationing of care; research and assessment about comparative effectiveness of treatments; effects on national security; the political effects in 2012 and beyond; and perhaps most importantly, how health care systems analysts will benefit.

Speaking of readership benefits, you may have noticed that the majority of editorial content on the online version of OR/MS Today is now available to INFORMS members only. This was done in conjunction with the Institute’s desire to both enhance and encourage membership in INFORMS. We look forward to your comments.

Meanwhile, INFORMS’ outreach, online-only publication, Analytics (analytics-magazine.com) continues to be offered in its entirety at no cost to members and non-members alike. In keeping with INFORMS’ goal of becoming the “face of analytics,” we’ve recently launched an Analytics Web site (http://analytics-magazine.com) that strives to be the online home and meeting place of analysts around the world. Check it out, and let us know how we can improve it. If you really want to tell the world what you think about any relevant topic, post a comment on the Web site’s blog.

— Peter Horner, editor
horner@lionhrtpub.com