Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Rural Emergency Hospitals (REHs) are a new Medicare provider type created to preserve essential emergency and outpatient access in rural communities where low inpatient volume makes full-service hospitals financially unsustainable. They receive enhanced outpatient payments and a fixed monthly facility payment in exchange for forgoing acute inpatient care. CMS has an REH fact sheet that…
That is the title of a paper by Longo et al. (2025). The authors use dynamic panel data on Adult Social Care (ASC) in the UK. What is ASC include: A quick explainer about ASC in the UK: In England, there are 152 upper-tier local authorities (LAs) who are responsible for publicly-funded ASC services. Access…
That is the title of a new paper out last week in Future Oncology with co-authors Kejal Jadhav, Cheryl Warren, Sabiha Quddus, Nadine Zawadzki, Daisy Yang, Andrea Damon, Kathryn Spurrier, Katharine Batt and David Wei. The abstract is below. ObjectiveTyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) have transformed the prognosis of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) into a manageable…
On September 19, 2025, an executive order increased the fee for new H-1B petitions from approximately $3500 to $100 000 per applicant. How is this policy likely to impact the healthcare workforce in the U.S.? A paper by Liu et al. (2025) uses Department of Labor data on certified Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) supporting H-1B visas…
That is the title of a recent paper by Gao, Kim, and Sevilir (2025). The authors examine 1218 hospital merger and acquisition (M&A) deals in the hospital industry between 2001 and 2008. The authors focus solely on M&A deals with for-profit entities as they argue that they want to examine whether private equity (PE) specifically…
According to a recent Health Affairs Perspective from Michael Chernew, the answer is ‘no’. In fact, physician and hospital prices may be too low. Although much has been made of high prices contributing to high spending in the US, 5 spending growth in Medicare is not driven by price growth. In fact, inflation-adjusted Medicare physician…
That is the topic of a Health Affairs Forefront article by Neprash, Perkins and Mehrotra (2025). This is an important question as approximately one in four visits are now provided by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) across the Medicare program. NPs and PAs can either bill payers one of two ways: They can…
These are the findings from the American Medical Association’s 2024 Physician Practice Benchmark Survey. Physicians included in the survey include those who practice in the U.S., actively see patients, and have completed residency. Here is what the survey finds: Increasingly, physicians are less likely to work in small practices that they or other physicians own.…
How does a hospital’s participation in a health plan’s Medicare Advantage (MA) provider network impact their commercial rates? Since many insurers offer both MA plans and commercial plans, there could be spillovers with respect to negotiating. How would MA network participation impact commercial rates? Marr et al. (2025) offers some hypotheses: On the one hand,…
A recent paper by Kacerek and Mattingly (2025) aims to answer why certain drugs are defined as “specialty” drugs and others are not. They first cite an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report: The OIG found that there was no standard definition in Medicaid and that Medicaid programs used more than 100 different characteristics to…