Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
For many individuals with employer-provided health insurance, a recent paper by Liu and Sydnor (2022) find that this is indeed the case. The authors use data from the 2011-2016 Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Employer Health Benefits Survey (EHBS). The authors examine the maximum out-of-pocket cost (including both premiums and maximum cost-sharing) as well as whether…
President Trump wants to allow more people be able to purchase lower cost health plans. Most of the media has focused on plans to make it easier to purchase short-term plans and association health plans. However, a recent final rule is also making it easier to use pre-tax dollars to fund premiums for individual health…
As the N.Y. Times reports, more transparency is coming to provider prices. The White House released an executive order Monday afternoon intended to require insurance companies, doctors and hospitals to give patients more information about precisely what their care will cost before they get it. More transparency is generally good and surprise billing for out-of-network costs has been a major…
This is the question that Zhang et al. (2017) attempt to answer using data form people who switched to a high-deductible health plan (HDHP) compared to those who stayed in the same plan. They found: After enrollment in HDHPs, 28 percent of enrollees changed physicians for office visits (compared to 19 percent in the Traditional…
Initiatives such as high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) aim to transfer risk form insurers to patients. The rationale behind this risk transfer is that when patients are in control of more funds, there will be less moral hazard and patients will use health care resources more efficiently. That is the theory, but does it bear out…
According to a recent study in JAMA, the answer may be no. High-deductible health plans aim to not only reduce the use of unnecessary services, but to make consumers more price sensitive and search for high quality, low priced care. The latter goal, however, depends crucially on whether patients have access to information on accurate…
Are high deductible health plans (HDHP) the holy grail for reducing cost? If so, how do consumers go about reducing cost, by reducing all utilization or shopping around for better prices? This is the research question that Ben Handel presented at 2016 ASSA meetings. He uses data from a large firm with 35,000-60,000 employees and…
The goal of LyfeBank is basically to serve as a 401(k) for health insurance. Employers can make contributions to the employees health insurance into a fund and workers can use this money to buy various health insurance products, reimburse themselves for co-payments or deductibles, or pay for medical costs directly. LyfeBank has two key innovations. The…
The California Healthcare Foundation looks at the latest health insurance trends in the nation’s most populous state. In California, like in many states, there is a blurring line between what defines an HMO compared to other forms of health insurance. Almost all insurance carriers now offer “a broad array of products, some of which do not…
Many economists feel that Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) are the direction in which health reform needs to head. HSAs combine high-deductible health plans with tax-deferred savings account. The theory behind HSAs is for the patient to pay for ‘basic’ health care to reduce the problem of moral hazard while letting insurance pay for catestrophic illnesses.…