Orshe

It’s crunch time in the fight over a health-care bill, so groups for and against the legislation are getting ready for a final push before congressional votes that could come later this month.

These efforts take money, of course, and advocate groups have put together war chests, much of it slated to go to advertising. Here are some of the spending plans outlined in a WSJ report this morning:

Five CEOs from the health-insurance big dogs (UnitedHealth, WellPoint, etc.) are at the White House this morning to discuss — or more accurately, take flack — over the health overhaul’s issue de jour: rising insurance premiums.

Well, there was no breakthrough of understanding between Democrats and Republicans over health care at today’s summit, but there were areas of agreement on some issues. Of course even where there were shared goals, there was division over how to achieve them.

But the aim of the summit was to find shared ground, so here are some small patches of agreement during the session:

President Obama has juggled the health-overhaul plans approved by the House and the Senate and added some twists of his own to come up with a White House proposal he hopes can win enough support for passage in both chambers.

The Obama plan is crafted mainly from the Senate-passed bill, but not entirely. Here are some of the big points in the proposal, as posted on the White House Web site:

Now that it’s expanded health-insurance coverage to nearly all of its citizens, Massachusetts is trying to figure out what to do about the rapid rise of health costs.

The latest proposal comes from the state’s governor, Deval Patrick, who yesterday proposed a bill that would give the state the power to review — and, in some cases, reject — rate increases by doctors and hospitals.

Here’s a key paragraph from the bill:

Suppose a hypothetical drug cost $10 million, was likely to extend life by only a day or two and didn’t improve quality of life. Should insurance pay for the drug?

Probably not — it would increase the cost for everyone paying premiums, without doing much to help the sick. But where do you draw the line?

The U.S. spent $2.472 trillion on health care last year, according to a paper out today in the journal Health Affairs. That’s $282 million an hour.

Because they can.

Some Massachusetts hospitals charge private insurers twice as much as other hospitals. It’s not because they deliver higher quality care or treat sicker patients. It’s not because they treat a different mix of uninsured, Medicare, Medicaid and private-insurance patients.

It’s because they have market leverage and can negotiate higher prices in their contracts with insurance companies.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine has a provocative finding: Bigger co-payments for primary-care and specialty doctor visits were tied to more in-patient hospital time for elderly patients.

Rising health-care costs are a problem that can never be solved outright; they can only be managed in an eternal, iterative way. So including a bunch of little pilot projects in the Senate health-care bill — rather than a few big, sweeping measures — is a step in the right direction, Atul Gawande argues in this week’s New Yorker.