Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Medicare’s Hospital Compare website evaluates hospital quality. One of the most recent measures to be added to Hospital Compare is a measure of efficiency. The measure calculates a price-standardized, case-mix adjusted measure of spending during period before, during and after a hospital admission. The Healthcare Economist (Jason Shafrin) and a team at Acumen (including Tom…
How does Medicare adjust payments to physician practices to account for regional differences in input costs such as employee wages, office rent, malpractice insurance and other expenses? I recently co-authored a report in support of the CMS final rule which explains how CMS will make these adjustments for 2012. Among the key revisions are an…
My paper on how physician compensation affects surgery rates is being published in the May 2010 edition of Health Economics. The abstract from the article is below: “This paper employs a nationally representative, household-based dataset in order to test how the compensation method of both the specialists and the primary care providers affects surgery rates.…
Most women gain weight after marriage. However, this may not just be do to having a child. The New York Times reports on a recent study by Annette Dobson in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. They find that “[a]fter adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20…
A paper written by John Fontanesi and myself was recently published in the October 2009 edition of the American Journal of Managed Care. The paper is titled “Delivering Vaccines: A Case Study of the Distribution System of Vaccines for Children.” The abstract of the paper is below: Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of the central- ization…
Researches at UNC found that marriage may make you happy and healthy but fat as well. If you’ve been a loyal reader of the Healthcare Economist, however, you knew that already. Jason Shafrin’s research on marriage and weight gain already showed that marriage leads to increased weight gain. In fact, the research demonstrated that one…
This week I’ll be in Vancouver for the Western Economic Association International Conference. I’ll be presenting my paper on “Why Does Getting Married Make You Fat? Incentives and Appearance Maintenance.”
Today, April 13th, I successfully defended my dissertation. I now officially have a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.
Daniel Wiesen and Jason Shafrin ask you to participate in an economic survey. By completing the survey, you will help advance the science of economics. Further, if you complete the survey by March 20, you will be made eligible to win a $25 gift card to Amazon. To take the survey click on this link or paste…
Daniel Wiesen and Jason Shafrin ask you to participate in an economic survey. By completing the survey, you will help advance the science of economics. Further, if you complete the survey by March 20, you will be made eligible to win a $25 gift card to Amazon. To take the survey click on this…