Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What is driving Medicare spending growth? According to a recent health affairs paper by Amitabh Chandra, Maurice A. Dalton, and Jonathan Holme (2013), the answer is post acute care. The authors use Medicare claims (5 percent MedPAR sample) to examine changes in Meidcare spending between 1994 and 2009. The authors find that post-acute spending has…
For many years, projections from CMS and CBO have claimed that excess cost growth (i.e., growth in healthcare spending above and beyond the growth in GDP) will slow in the distant future. One reason is mechanical, if current rates continued, healthcare spending at some point would make up the entire economy. The mechanism through which…
Is regional variation in health care spending larger for Medicare beneficiaries or those enrolled in private health plans? Before answering that question, one should better understand the sources of this variation. Regional variation in spending can be due to variation in the utilization, variation in prices, or both. A paper by Philipson et al. (2010)…
In addition to detailed work examining regional variation in Medicare spending between 2007 and 2009, I also conducted a study examining trends in regional variation in Medicare spending and quality between 1992 and 2010. The study was unique because: (i) it covers 19 years of data up to 2010, (ii) the data rely on 100%…
The Healthcare Economist has a new report out for the Institute of Medicine. The report is co-authored with a number of outstanding individuals at Acumen including: Thomas MaCurdy, Jay Bhattacharya, Daniella Perlroth, Anita Au-Yeung, Hani Bashour, Camille Chicklis, Kennan Cronen, Brandy Lipton, Shahin Saneinejad, Elen Shrestha, and Sajid Zaidi. IOM summarizes the goals of the…
Patients with multiple chronic conditions are difficult to treat. As people continue to live longer, the number of chronic conditions they must cope with often increases. A Robert Wood Johnson report on chronic conditions reaches the following conclusions. The number of people with chronic conditions is rapidly rising. Between 2000 and 2030, the number of…
CMS has just released a new interactive tool that allows users to examine chronic conditions among Medicare beneficiaries. The CMS Chronic Conditions Dashboard presents statistical views of information on the prevalence, utilization and Medicare spending for Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions. The Dashboard displays information on a set of predefined chronic conditions available in the…
According to research from the CMS Office of the Actuary, healthcare spending growth is decelerating. As published in Health Affairs: In 2011 US health care spending grew 3.9 percent to reach $2.7 trillion, marking the third consecutive year of relatively slow growth. Growth in national health spending closely tracked growth in nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010…
Most people stereotype European economies as a single payer system whereas the U.S. uses a system of private insurance that is largely unregulated. This characterization is largely false. The U.S. has extensive regulation. Further, the U.S. federal government pays for the largest share of health care. According to a CHCF report, in 2010, the federal…
Reuters reports on a PwC study evaluating health care premium growth. “The cost of healthcare services is expected to rise 7.5 percent in 2013, more than three times the projected rates for inflation and economic growth, according to an industry research report released on Thursday. But premiums for large employer-sponsored health plans could increase by…