Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Does advertising work? (ACA edition) Is an individual mandate constitutional? Demand for health services researchers. NIH grant reviews: “The intraclass correlation — a statistic that refers to how much groups agree — was 0 for the scores assigned. This meant that there was no agreement at all on the quality of any application.” AMA: CVS-Aetna…
While many advancements have been made thus far in the progression toward value-based health care, there are persistent challenges in the measurement of value. In order to deliver value-based care, health care decision makers, eg, insurers and health system administrators, need value data at their fingertips—data that are relevant to their own context and reflect…
While most patients in Medicare use the traditional fee-for-service route, a growing percentage of Medicare beneficiaries are relying on managed care plans through Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage provides beneficiaries with additional choice and also serves as a competitive alternative to traditional Medicare. In theory, Medicare should just allocate a beneficiary’s funding to a managed care…
Let’s say you have a test and it is composed of a bunch of different questions. Or you have a set of statistics–say statistics measuring how good a basketball player is–and you want to know how closely these statistics reliably measure the same thing. What you are looking for is a way to measure test…
CMS has focused in recent years on payment reform–especially alternative payment models–in Medicare’s fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement system, but much less has been paid to beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare’s managed care program (i.e., Medicare Advantage). Currently, however, more than 1 in 3 beneficiaries are enrolled in an Medicare Advantage plan, and by 2028 that number could…
Who has more scientific publications: the U.S. or China? Is digital health a social science? How do U.S. healthcare prices compare to the rest of the world? Does continuing medical education work? What is the cost of defensive medicine fears? What does an effective lobbyist look like?
Hank Stern has posted A Midsummer Night’s Health Wonk Review at InsureBlog. The HWR reviews the latest and greats posts from the health wonk-o-sphere. In this edition, you can learn about Association Health Plans, the pros and cons of a number of mega-mergers in the health sector, and the effect of GOP plans to end Obamacare, among others.…
Many of Medicare’s alternative payment models are based on the premise that there is a lot of waste in health care. If that is the case, we could reduce cost with little to no effect on quality. While that would be nice, is that really the case? Consider two articles from the most recent edition…
As of 2015, only 8 percent of US adults ages thirty-five and older had received all of the high-priority, appropriate clinical preventive services recommended for them. Nearly 5 percent of adults did not receive any such services. This is from a recent Health Affairs paper by Borsky et al. (2018). This is despite the Affordable…
Medicare provides health insurance for 58.4 million Americans. To provide health care to largely elderly Americans, it spent $710 billion in 2017. One key question is, does the federal government have the funds to continue to support this program as the baby boomers retire? According to the 2018 Medicare Trustees report, the answer is increasingly…