Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the question answered in a paper by Autor et al. (2022). Some background on PPP: Congress enacted the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provided uncollateralized, low-interest loans of up to $10 million to firms with fewer than 500 employees—loans that were forgivable on the condition that recipient firms maintained employment and wages at…
A paper by Ge et al. (2022) aims to answer this question with a discrete choice experiment survey of medical students at Shandong University in China. Respondents had to select a preferred treatment which varied over 3 dimensions: profit to the physician, patient health benefit, and patient financial cost. The paper abstract is below: The…
Imagine that you are a policymaker and an academic researcher shows you evidence for a new health intervention that will dramatically improve health outcomes. He shows you the study results, the estimated impact and a p-value that is less than 0.05. How much credibility should you give to this result? What quantiative approach should you…
Trends in retail prescription drug costs. How would you fix the federal budget? ACA premiums fall. Prioritizing mental health care. School choice and housing values. Liability risk and innovation. European Health Data Space: what’s next?
As the rates of COVID-19 increased the burden on hospitals in the early months of the pandemic, hospitals were decry a lack of beds and pressure on staff. While COVID-19 is of course a very acute case of over-crowding, a more general question is how much does hospital crowding impact health outcomes. A paper by…
In order for health care providers to be reimbursed for the services they provide, they need to input a variety of information into health insurance claims systems including what type of services were performed. The codes used to define the services provided are Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) or Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes.…
In the past, seniors in Medicare had to pay for all their prescription drugs out-of-pocket. For elderly individuals with multiple medical conditions, this lack of coverage was highly burdensome. To address this issue, in 2006, Medicare Part D began which provided some coverage for prescription drugs. To keep the cost of Part D down, however,…
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,…