Healthcare Economist in JAMA
Along with co-authors Amitabh Chandra and Ravinder Dhawan, please check out my most recent publication “Utility of Cancer Value Frameworks for Patients, Payers, and Physicians” in the latest issue of JAMA.
Month: May 2016
Top 100 Economics Blogs of 2016
Healthcare Economist made the cut at #82.
Is value-based purchasing working for hospitals?
The Incidental Economist is one of my favorite blogs to read. This week’s post on a recent BMJ article on the failure of P4P did not disappoint. The article (Figueroa et al. 2016) looks at 4267 acute care hospitals in the United States that participated in Medicare’s Hospital Value Based Purchasing (HVBP) system. During my time…
Friday Links
MIPS and APM, explained. Medical errors = #3 cause of death. Should you circumcise your children? Eminent domain for drugs? The end of qualitative research?
Is Obamacare working?
The answer is yes and no. According to a study Holahan, Karpman, and Zuckerman (2016), the health insurance exchange plans are good at insuring individuals against financial losses, but not everyone is happy with the care they are receiving. Low- and moderate-income adults with Marketplace coverage are no more likely to report problems paying medical…
Do ACOs reduce spending?
Medicare’s Shared Savings Program (MSSP) is a program that created accountable care organizations (ACOs). Providers in get bonuses if they are able to reduce health care costs and also maintain quality. In theory, the program makes sense, increase reimbursement for high-quality, low-cost providers. The key question, however, is whether it works. A recent study in NEJM…
The Terrorist Economist?
Truth is stranger than fiction. The Washington Post reports: she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to…
“Adjustments” drive variation in Medicare hospital reimbursement rates
In my previous work, I have examined regional variation in Medicare and Medicaid costs through reports to the Institute of Medicine and publications in peer-reviewed journals. We found significant variation in health care costs across regions, that high-cost regions tended to remain high cost over time, but that a region that is high-cost for treating one medical condition…
Quotation of the Day
Doubt grows with knowledge. J.W. von Goethe The comprehension of truth calls for higher powers than the defence of error. J.W. von Goethe
HWR is up
Brad Wright has posted Health Wonk Review: Pivoting Towards the General Edition at Wright on Health. Check it out!