Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Many health care wonks claim that health care is a market unlike any other. Unique features make it unsuited to be governed by a market economy. However, research research by Amitabh Chandra, et al. (2013) claims that healthcare providers act like firms in most any other industry. The conventional wisdom in health economics is that large…
The ACA offers States the option to expand Medicaid eligibility to millions of Americans. The goal of the expansion was to increase poor and middle class Americans’s access to affordable health care. However, access to acute care may be getting more difficult for poor individuals. A recent article looking at Milwaukee’s hospital market describes how hospitals are…
According to a Commonwealth Fund report examining the health care system of 11 countries, Americans receive the worst health care. The report summarizes the findings as follows: The United States health care system is the most expensive in the world, but comparative analyses consistently show the U.S. underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance.…
Was health reform successful in Minnesota? If the metric of interest is reducing the number of uninsured, the answer is certainly yes. A State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) report finds: The number of uninsured in Minnesota fell from 445,000 (8.2 percent of the population) to about 264,500 (4.9 percent of the population). How…
Don’t be a rationalist. Moral hazard? The end of patents? How much market power to hospitals really have? Principal-agent problem. Minimum access to care standards.
That is the headline from an Avalere report. The top 5 Exchange plans in the state of Washington increased premiums between 6 and 12%. The Exchange plans with market share ranks of 6 or 7, on the other hand, had increases between 0-2% and the 8th place plans even cut rates by almost 7%. Is…
Monsieur Jeff Root of RootFin hosts this week’s round-up of risky posts from the home of Brie, Merlot and Deneuve. It’s a great one, too, with an interesting selection of posts covering everything from Paget’s Disease to the World Cup
Autism (and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)) and autism are disorders are characterized, in varying degrees, by difficulties in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and repetitive behaviors. CDC identified about 1 in 68 American children as on the autism spectrum. One question is, how much does it cost to take care of an austistic child? A recent study…
Which treatments are better than others? Ideally, medicines that provide large health benefits and cost little will be preferred to those that offer little health benefits and/or cost a lot. In health economics, one way to systematically evaluate different treatments is the efficiency frontier. The efficiency frontier methodology is an extension of the standard approach…
The VA scandal of long wait times is now well-known. Part of the reason why patients were left off official wait lists–ironically–was because VA senior staffers wanted to reduce wait times. Senior VA staff monitored wait times closely to check for any upticks. Some of the VA management at the Phoenix hospital believed the only…