Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
FDA speeds up drug approvals. Murder rate in Brazil. Is price transparency a good thing for employers? “Performance measures contribute little to physician compensation irrespective of ACO participation.” CAR-T: “hospitals lose $300,000 for every patient treated” Is AI overpromising and underdelivering?
The answer is ‘yes’ according to a paper by Probst, Eberth, and Crouch (2019). The reason they cite is “structural urbanism”. Economists may be to blame. Consider a typical economist’s perspective. One wants to balance costs and benefits. If one wants ‘fair’ allocation per person, then of course equal funding will give more funding to…
In Health Affairs, CMS Office of the Actuary (OACT) notes that while health care spending grew in 2018, it actually fell as a percentage of the economy. US health care spending increased 4.6 percent to reach $3.6 trillion in 2018, a faster growth rate than the rate of 4.2 percent in 2017 but the same…
The answer is ‘maybe’. Some are scarred by the distance between the hype and reality of electronic health records (EHR), which promised both improved efficiency for practices and superior patient health outcomes. In practice–especially in the short-turn–EMR resulted in a lot of both direct and data entry cost to practices with limited interoperability and modest…
The central proposition of the Grossman model (Grossman 1972) is that health can be viewed as a durable capital stock that produces an output of healthy time. It is assumed that individuals inherit an initial stock of health that depreciates with age and can be increased by investment. The model is similar to human capital…
How do you define if an area is rural? A paper by Bennett et al. (2019) provides some options. Population density. This is one of the simplest approaches and can be applied to any geographic unit. However, it may be problematic for geographic units with a mix of urban and rural sections. MSA-based. The Office…
Medicaid reimbursement access and health outcomes. Where to move to in old age. The cost of Alzheimer’s to Medicaid managed care. The impact of the soda tax. Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program performance explained: “74.3% to 86.5% of the improvement in ERRs [excess readmission ratio] for penalized hospitals was explained by RTM [regression to the mean].”