Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Re-insurance is used to help insurers the cost of unpredictable, high cost events. Government re-insurance likely had a beneficial effect of attracting new firms to the market when Part D was rolled out in 2006. However, to what extent is re-insurance important for the Part D market compared to in the commercial market. A paper…
Do most employees with HDHP have employer funded HSAs? Are cardiovascular drugs providing high value? Cash transfers→ better health? “We need to be innovative with our care as long as we fervently believe we can do it safely,” Raj of the NHS.
Yesterday I noted that competition is key to driving down prices in health insurance markets. Competition is about expanding the number of suppliers available for a given product. Now let’s think about the demand side. Does reducing the number of purchasers increase or decrease price? One could think that price would fall because buyers would…
An interesting news story from PBS Newshour on pharmacy benefits manager (PBM). Of particular interest is a clip of Alex Azar testifying that “We may need to move toward a system without rebates, where PBMs receive no compensation from the very pharma companies that they are supposed to be negotiating against.”
Federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) ended in September 2017. This caused a stir as many parent’s relied on CHIP for their children’s health insurance. In January 2018, however, the federal government’s passed a six-year CHIP funding extension and resolved to continue to fund this program. The headlines at the time showed pictures of…
The National Cancer Institute defines personalized medicine as “uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease”. In practice, however, patient treatment is rarely personalized by individual since evidence to support complete personalization is rarely available. Personalization in practice more often means care that varies with some individual characteristics.…
Competition matters for markets…even health care markets. A paper by Van Parys (2018) relies on a database of plan premium and market characteristics among states with federally-facilitated health insurance exchange Marketplaces. In this analysis, she finds that: In 2018, Marketplace premiums were 50 percent ($180) higher, on average, in rating areas with monopolist insurers, compared…
In June of this year, CBO laid out the projected fiscal health of the federal budget over the coming decades in their 2018 Long Term Budget Outlook report. This report project’s “extended baseline” scenarios that assume that all laws on the books will be implemented as written. For instance, if there is a spending bill…
An interesting study from Kolodziej et al. (2018) using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. They aim to measure what happens to adults’ labor force participation when they provide informal care to their parents. To offset the problem of endogeneity, we exploit the availability of other potential caregivers within the family…