Health care costs were 4.4 percent lower for HealthPartners members in these consumer directed health plans compared to members in traditional plans.

Several hundred primary care physicians have begun to offer patients prepaid plans, a practice that supporters maintain tackles two crises in U.S. health care.

Summaries of two editorials and an opinion piece on issues related to Medicare appear below.

House Budget Committee discussed whether tax code changes could help expand health care coverage to the uninsured.

Republicans asked to vote to override President Bush's veto of SCHIP legislation.

Universal affordable health insurance coverage is essential to a high performance health system; reform design will matter for improving quality and controlling costs.

Democrats from the House Ways and Means Health and Oversight subcommittees on Tuesday during a joint hearing said that CMS officials must ensure that private Medicare Advantage plans provide promised benefits and that the agency should seek to recover over payments to the plans, CQ Health Beat reports.

Health insurance status, not race, increases an individual's likelihood of having a perforated appendix.

Insurers CDPHP and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield agreed to raise reimbursement rates to health centers in the Hudson Headwaters Health Network, a not-for-profit system of community health centers that provides care for 60,000 residents in the Adirondacks region of upstate New York, the Albany Times Union reports.

Fifty-two percent of U.S. residents trust Democrats to handle issues with SCHIP.

Republican leaders are confident President Bush's veto of legislation that would have reauthorized and expanded SCHIP will be sustained.

Summaries of editorials, opinion pieces and letters to the editor address President Bush's veto of legislation that would have reauthorized and expanded SCHIP.

Philadelphia Inquirer examined recent efforts by states to expand health insurance coverage to more residents and to make health care more accessible and affordable.

Health insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage plans that were found by CMS audits to have violated Medicare marketing standards on Tuesday said that they were working to fix the problems and that they would provide better services to beneficiaries, the New York Times reports. The comments came as concerns were expressed by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chair Pete Stark (D-Calif.) over marketing of MA plans and insurers' handling of claims and appeals.

CQ HealthBeat discusses House Democrats' efforts to override President Bush's veto of SCHIP expansion legislation.