Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What happens when consumers have have fewer health plan choices? In single payer markets, this may just result in less satisfied individuals. In the U.S., however, individuals can opt of of one type of insurance (e.g., health insurance exchanges) and into others (e.g., Medicaid, private insurance). One interesting question is empirically, how does the number…
This is the question a paper by Chambers et al. (2019) aims to answer. The authors analyzed coverage decision of 204 drugs (or 409 unique drug–indication pairs based on information from the Tufts Medical Center Specialty Drug Evidence and Coverage (SPEC) database. This database contains coverage information for 17 or the top 20 health plans…
That is the title of an article in Spotlight on Market Access published by MMIT Radar. The article examines how FDA decisions to expedite getting treatments to market will be received by payers. The Healthcare Economist is quoted extensively in the article: Payers have two key concerns, maintains Jason Shafrin, Ph.D., senior director of policy…
Last week I reviewed a paper the sought to understand why people don’t buy health insurance. A key finding was that there health insurance purchase was correlated with income, but not perfectly. One reason was that the cost of other goods–especially housing–affected individuals ability to purchase insurance. The paper was getting at whether health insurance…
In short, most of them want to expand government payment for and control of health care in the United States. Looking at the top 10 candidates (Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobuchar, Yang, Castro, Gabbard) according to recent polls captured on 538, I staked out the candidates current positions on reforming the health…
Active service military need health care. How do they get it? For the 9.5 million active military beneficiaries and their families, the Military Health Service (MHS) provides the health care they need. Some of the medical care is provided at military facilities and some care is purchased through non-military (i.e., civilian) providers. A paper by…
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…
The simple answer is, they can’t afford it. This may be a good argument for low-income individuals but for middle class and even upper middle class individuals we see people going without health insurance. The question is why. If income was the whole story, we would observe different incomes levels would have closer to 100%…
One piece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated that health insurance plans for individuals with yearly premiums exceeding $10,200 or family health insurance plans with premiums exceeding $27,500 would be subject to a tax. The tax originally was set to start in 2018, but has since been postponed to 2022. The Kaiser Family Foundation…
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…