Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Not surprisingly, the impact is significant. That is according to a study by Malone et al. (2022), estimated using a difference-in-difference design with data between 2001 and 2018. Specifically, they find: Of the 1759 nonmetro counties in our study sample, 109 experienced a hospital closure during the study period. Relative to the nonclosure counterfactual, closures…
Progress and pitfalls of bundled payment. Direct-to-employer contracting. Are bad online reviews an indicator of quality? Racial disparities and fear of COVID. Coverage after the public health emergency ends.
Is telehealth over before it began? Let’s hope not. First, there is the clinical aspect. While telehealth was vital during the pandemic, it is unclear to what degree telehealth can fully substitute for in-person care (see Hatef et al. 2022). Likely telehealth is superior to in-person visits for some types of care, inferior for others,…
When new drugs are approved, FDA limits their on-label use to the treatment of specific diseases. A key question is whether the definition of a disease should be narrower or broader. Make the disease definition too broad, then there may not be strong evidence from the clinical trial to support its use among these types…
Medicare Part D plans have begun using preferred pharmacy networks in order to steer their beneficiaries to lower cost pharmacies. A key question is, does this work? A paper by Xu et al. (2022) aims to answer this question using 2011-2016 data. that compares Low Income Subsidy (LIS) Medicare beneficiaries and non-LIS beneficiaries. LIS beneficiaries…
Operation Warp Speed for nasal COVID-19 vaccines? End of the airplane mask mandate? How should you think of copay coupons? Does access to affordable housing reduce child abuse? “Increased substance abuse accounts for between 9 and 26 percent of the decline in prime-age labor-force participation between February 2020 and June 2021”
In many markets, however, we observe that lower income individuals do not purchase the most generous forms of health insurance. For instance, despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act–which provided subsidies to lower income individuals to purchase relatively generous insurance–some individuals preferred the less generous Association Health Plans (AHPs) also known as “skinny” health…
Many countries allow private plans to administer health insurance benefits but with restrictions on premiums and with the potential for risk adjusted government payments based on the health of a health plan pool For instance, Belgium , Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland all have mandatory health insurance schemes; Ireland and Australia have voluntary health…
That is the title of a recent FTI Journal article from my colleague Margaret E. Guerin-Calvert, the President, of FTI Consulting’s Center for Healthcare Economics and Policy. An excerpt is below. Indeed, pre-pandemic data collected by FTI Consulting’s Center for Healthcare Economics and Policy for two metropolitan areas, Buffalo and Nashville, portends trouble. Just three chronic conditions…
In many countries including the US and England, hospitals are paid by payers (i.e., commercial insurers and governments) on a per-admission basis with more reimbursement for treating patients with more severe conditions and lower reimbursement for treating patients with less severe conditions. This system is known in the U.S. as the diagnosis-related group (DRG) system,…