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Is Private Health Insurance Really Superior to Public Programs?
On this episode of Managed Care Cast, Charlie Wray, DO, MS, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, outlines the findings of a paper he coauthored which assessed Americans' experiences with their insurance providers.
In a recent paper published in JAMA Network Open, Charlie Wray, DO, MS, and colleagues examined experiences and opinions of nearly 150,000 Americans representing the 5 major forms of health insurance coverage.
Specifically, the researchers used survey data from the 2016-2018 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and compared access to care, cost of care, and reported satisfaction among those with public or private insurance.
Representing the experiences of over 61 million US adults, respondents included Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries, those with Veterans Health Administration or military coverage, and those with individually purchased and employer-sponsored coverage.
On this episode of Managed Care Cast, Wray, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, describes the surprising findings of the teams’ analyses, and offers some solutions to improving the quality of health insurance coverage in the United States.
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Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
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