Quality of Care at Teaching Hospitals

Medicare pays higher reimbursement to teaching hospitals through indirect medical education (IME) payments to hospitals that train a high share of residents. IME inflate standard reimbursements in an attempt to compensate hospitals for these additional costs. Medicare also pay hospitals directly for some cost of training residents through the graduate medical education (GME). A key…

Book Review: Uncontrolled Spread

If you want to learn more about what went wrong for America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a great book to read is Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic. Gottlieb is a physician, a former FDA commissioner, and a member of the National Academy of…

Did the Oncology Care Model produce cost savings?

The answer is ‘yes’, but the magnitude of these savings are relatively small and more than offset by additional OCM program costs. Keating et al. (2021) writes: In this exploratory difference-in-differences study of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries with cancer undergoing chemotherapy (483 310 beneficiaries with 987 332 episodes treated at 201 OCM participating practices and 557 354 beneficiaries with…

Impact of drug coverage on mortality

Clayton 2019 is an interesting study on the impact of drug spending on Medicaid beneficiary mortality levels. The author uses variation in the roll out of Medicaid drug coverage by state across different Medicaid eligible groups in order to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in drug expenditures. Using this approach, Clayton finds that: …a $1 increase…

I have too many control variables…which ones should I include in my regression model?

Supposed you have some data on health care spending for different individuals and you want to know which patient characteristics increase health care spending. While this seems like something any health economist could do, measuring the relationship require both knowing (i) which independent variables to include in your data analysis and (ii) their functional form.…