Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
No, this is not coming nation-wide, but it may be on its way in California. Kaiser Health News reports: A provision in California’s newly approved state budget will eliminate the asset test for the 2 million Californians enrolled in both Medi-Cal and Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older and people…
I recently finished reading the book titled The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander. The premise of the book is very interesting. It takes a detailed look at a hospital in rural America, Bryan, Ohio to be specific. The book touches on the challenges a small-town hospital from…
Increasingly, integrated delivery networks (IDNs) are creating their own full-blown specialty pharmacies. Many are familiar with the integrated payer-provider model from groups such as Kaiser Permanente. However, other IDNs are getting into the game according to a recent white paper. Why are IDNs considering creating their own specialty pharmacies? Address patient access concerns. The number…
Taking a break today from my normal health economics posting to celebrate my hometown Milwaukee Bucks winning the NBA Championship. What an amazing playoff run! The Sun block… And the alley oop!
A paper from Nayak et al. (2021) in JAMA Internal Medicine describes how public-private partnerships have helped bring new biologic drugs to market. Using data on new biologic drugs approved by the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Reseach (CDER) and US patent office data, the authors find that: Twenty-nine drugs (42%) showed evidence of…
$2.2 trillion deficit in 2021. Adverse selection and ACA plans. COVID-19 and panic drug purchasing. Amazon: $6 six-month prescriptions Pharmacist’s opinion on value-based comprehensive medication management
That is the finding from a white paper from the Schizophrenia and Psychosis Action Alliance titled “Societal Costs of Schizophrenia & Related Disorders“. I am a co-author on the paper. Below is a summary of the findings: …the societal costs of schizophrenia were estimated to be $281.6 billion in 2020…Direct costs for individuals living with…
From a recent article in NBER by Dunn et al. (2021): Observing the back-and-forth sequences of claims’ denials and resubmissions for past visits, we can estimate physicians’ costs of haggling with insurers to collect payments. Combining these costs with the revenue never collected, we estimate that physicians lose 17% of Medicaid revenue to billing problems,…
Last Friday, President Biden released an executive order titled “Promoting Competition in the American Economy” While the order talk about transportation, internet companies, and farming, there were a number of provisions related to health care. I summarize each of these below. Specifically I review OTC hearing aids. Currently, many patients need to visit a doctor…
Unsurprisingly, high-deductible health plans lead to lower utilization of healthcare services. A study by Sandoval et al. (2021) use data from 2007-2019 from Switzerland to show that this is the case. Participants with high-deductible plans reported forgoing health care more frequently than those with low-deductible plans (331 [13.5%] vs 591 [8.7%]). In adjusted analysis, higher-deductible…