Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Recent news articles have spilled much ink about the current nurse shortage. According to Pew, due to nursing shortages “Hospitals nationwide are canceling nonemergency surgeries, struggling to quickly find beds for patients and failing to meet the minimum nurse-patient ratios experts recommend.” Nursing wages are rising as well. The Baltimore Sun reports that the University…
A paper by Ahmad and Anderson in JAMA last spring examined trends in the causes of death in the US. Below are the charts in terms of both the number of deaths and the share of total deaths. The data come from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The…
According to a study Bovell-Ammon et al. (2021) in JAMA Open, the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which tracks a nationally representative cohort of noninstitutionalized youths aged 15 to 22 years in 1979 through 2018. The authors used cumulative incidence function estimates to compare Blacks…
Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (HCP LAN) is dedicated to moving the health care system from volume-based, fee-for-service reimbursement, to alternative payment models (APM). While there are a large number of different types of APMs, broadly, all of them shift more financial risk to providers while also linking reimbursement to quality of care.…
From CMS’s office of the Actuary as reported in Health Affairs today: US health care spending increased 9.7 percent to reach $4.1 trillion in 2020, a much faster rate than the 4.3 percent increase seen in 2019. The acceleration in 2020 was due to a 36.0 percent increase in federal expenditures for health care that occurred largely in response…
What do the vaccination rates look like in the largest U.S. cities? In these cities, how do the characteristics of individuals in neighborhoods with low vs. high vaccination rates differ? To answer this question, a paper by Sacarny and Daw (2021) use data from 9 large US cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix,…
Previously, I wrote about how the US healthcare system imposes $90 billion of costs on physicians related to drug utilization management. According to a study by Kyle and Frakt (2021), the U.S. healthcare system also imposes a significant burden on patients as well. The authors use the 2019 Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS) to answer…
On this Labor Day, below find some interesting statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) on health care wages and employment. From the first graph, one can see that health care practitioners (e.g., physicians, nurse) have much higher wages than average but health care support workers (e.g., ) have…
The 2021 Medicare Trustees Report–formerly known as the “Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund“–had some grim news. Expenditures ($925.8 billion) exceeded revenues ($899.9 billion) in 2020. More worrying, the estimated depletion date for the Medicare (i.e., Hospital Insurance) trust…
In a previous post, I answered this question from the perspective of government agencies: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the answer is $10 million. Other agencies place use a somewhat lower number. The Food and Drug administration pegs the value at $9.5 million and the Department of Agriculture places the value at $8.9 million. However,…