Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title from an interesting paper by Andreyeva et al. (2023). The abstract is below: Between 2000 and 2020, the share of US hospital bed capacity under multi-unit firms (systems) increased from 58% to 81% – a rapid corporatization of a sector with $1.3 trillion in annual spend. However, little is known about…
That is the subtitle of an NBER working paper by Charles Gray, Abby E. Alpert & Neeraj Sood. The author examine recent mergers between pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and health insurers. On the one hand, integration may beneficial to consumers. It could: (i) improve operational efficiencies, and (ii) better align PBM incentives with those of…
There is even less competition then we may have thought according to a paper out this month by Socal et al. (2023): We identified a total of 565 facilities producing 1,379 unique generic APIs across forty-two countries. India, China, and Italy were the top producers; 14 percent of APIs were manufactured in the US. About a…
According to a 2022 CBO report, healthcare spending per person is much higher for commercially insured individuals than those insured by Medicare and this difference is largely drive by price differentials. Why are the outstanding research questions related to the prices commercial insurers pay providers? That is the topic of a recent Health Affairs article…
That is the question Park, Langellier, and Meyers (2022) aim to estimate in their recent Health Services Research publication. The authors use 2015-2017 data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services and control for other differences between integrated and non-integrated Medicare Advantage (MA) plans using state fixed effects and contract random effects. Using this…
Over time, physicians are less likely to operate in solo or small group practices. In fact, the share of physician-owned practices has fallen below 50% in recent years. A key question then is how does a physician’s environment or the group they have join affect their practice patterns? Previous research has found that a physician’s…
There is mixed evidence about whether hospital mergers improve quality. On the one hand, economies of scale could lead to more investment in information technology, or allow for further specialization of services. A recent paper by Wang et al. (2022) investigates the impact of a recent hospital merger on quality in New York. The merging…
It stands to reason that policies that aim to reduce drug prices or squeeze life science companies profits are likely to decrease incentives to finance the research and development needed to bring a drug to market. Previous estimates claim that bringing a new drug to market may cost over $2 billion, and life science companies…
Last Friday, President Biden released an executive order titled “Promoting Competition in the American Economy” While the order talk about transportation, internet companies, and farming, there were a number of provisions related to health care. I summarize each of these below. Specifically I review OTC hearing aids. Currently, many patients need to visit a doctor…
A book by Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind argued that big businesses–rather than small businesses–are the drivers of the economy. That book had the catchy title “Big is Beautiful“. A related question in the area of health economics is whether larger physician practices do better than smaller physician practices. Perhaps large practices can benefit from…