Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
…and three other questions about physician care. Do Medicare patients have shorter waiting times than those with commercial insurance? In the 2010 survey, among those seeking an appointment, most beneficiaries (75 percent) and most privately insured individuals (72 percent) reported “never” having to wait longer than they wanted for an appointment for routine care. Another…
Why is it so difficult to get physicians to work together to coordinate care for their patients? Here’s why: “The typical primary care physician has 229…other physicians working in 117…practices with which care must be coordinated, equivalent to an additional 99 physicians and 53 practices for every100 Medicare beneficiaries managed by the primary care physician.”…
Recent research from Avalere Health, LLC using Medicare Part D reveals some interesting trends. Overall, premiums for fee-for-service prescription drug plans (PDPs) increased by 3%. For beneficiaries who enrolled in a Top 10 plan, however, premiums actually decreased by 6%. This result was driven by a 12% decrease in premiums for the largest PDP, AARP…
Would Congressman Ryan’s proposal solve this problem? Medicare Part B pays outpatient physicians according to the billed Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, which differ in procedure and intensity….Using nationally representative data from the 2001 to 2003 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, this paper…finds strong evidence that these fee differentials influence physician’s coding choice for billing purposes…
Medicare is the largest payer in the $2.5 trillion dollar health care sector. Medicare made up one-fifth of that amount. Where does this money go? In a previous post I examined where Medicare payments went in 2008, and today I update those figures for 2010. Source: MedPAC. Report to The Congress: Medicare Payment Policy, March 2011.
Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal has made significant waves. Many will fear that the Ryan proposal means the end of Medicare and Medicaid. Although these programs will not end, there will be significant changes. One can think of many of these changes as a transfer of risk. Consider the Medicare program. Although Medicare will not…
Previous research by the team at Dartmouth Atlas found that there is significant regional variation in spending and disease diagnosis frequency, but this variation is not correlated with higher quality. However, regional variation may be overstated. According to Zuckerman et al. (2010): “Unadjusted Medicare spending per beneficiary was 52% higher in geographic regions in the…
Research by the Dartmouth Atlas team has indicated that Medicare spending is concentrated regionally. States such as Florida spend much more per beneficiary than do doctors who treat similar patients in low cost states like Minnesota. A recent paper by Reschovsky and co-authors, however, has determined that variation in supply-induced demand is not a major driver…
According to the CMS website, Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) are private, mostly not-for-profit organizations, which are staffed by professionals, mostly doctors and other health care professionals, who are trained to review medical care and help beneficiaries with complaints about the quality of care and to implement improvements in the quality of care available throughout the spectrum…
Medicare administrative data provides a rich source to conduct health services research. Researchers who wish to use this data, however, often have to restrict their sample population in order to have a similar types of patients and consistent data available. Today I review some popular methods to restrict Medicare samples for research use. Restrictions to…