90% of health plans think the use of alternative payment models will increase in the coming years

A recent report from the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (HCP LAN) examines how providers are getting paid in the U.S. today.  Traditionally, health care providers (e.g., physicians, hospitals) were paid via fee-for-service (FFS).  Fee-for-service means that every time a provider does a service, they get paid.  This is truly largely regardless of…

Book Review: Overcharged

In the book Overcharged, authors Charles Silver and David Hyman identify a number of problems with the current health care system.  Third party payment under a fee-for-service system means that providers have an incentive to provide more rather than less care.  Further, because the people receiving the services (patients) are not the ones who are footing…

Competition matters

While the high price of branded drugs often gets a lot of attention in the public, few realize that after patent expiration, prices often plunge dramatically and high quality treatments are available for extremely affordable prices.  Granlund and Bergman (2018) estimate the size of this price reduction using data from Sweden. In the long term,…

AMA and the adoption of digital medicine

There is a lot of hype about digital medicine.  Though the definition of what digitla medicine mans varies, many digital devices are able to monitor patient physiology, medication adherence, or other behavior and communicate that with the patient as well as their provider team. One key barrier to having the provider team actually use these…

Is health care a luxury or a necessity?

I ask this question in economic terms.  Luxury goods are defined as goods that increase as a share of a person’s (or country’s) budget as income increases; necessity goods are defined as goods that decrease as a share of a person’s (or country’s) budget as income increases.  There is actually mixed evidence on the topic…

Open-Source tools for economic modelling

QuantEcon is an interesting site from some high profile economists advocating for open-source tools for quantitative economic analysis.  The organization describes itself  on their website as follows: QuantEcon is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving economic modeling by enhancing computational tools for economists.  Our activities include developing and facilitating the development of open source software…