Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
From Lex Fridman’s interview with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA: …the first job that computer scientists said, AI researchers said was gonna go away was radiology because computer vision was going to achieve superhuman levels…and it did. Computer vision was superhuman in 2019….maybe a little bit later, 2020. And so it’s been a long time…
Let’s look at some data on mean annual physician income in the U.S. compared to other countries: U.S.: $458,100 Canada: $194,700 Netherlands: $185,700 Sweden: $115,200 Why are U.S. physician incomes so much higher than other developed countries? Is it a good idea to try to drive down physician incomes? An NBER working paper by Buehler…
From a recent paper by Nasseh et al. 2026 in Health Services Research: Following acquisition, private equity-owned dental offices increased charges for dental care services by 3.3% (95% CI: 2.3%–4.4%), although allowed prices for these services remained statistically unchanged. Dental offices acquired by private equity firms tended to shift from diagnostic and preventive procedures to…
The number of hospitals owned by private equity (PE) firms has increased in recent years. One key question is how increased PE ownership has impact quality of care. To answer the question, a Jiao 2025 Health Services Research paper used claims Medicaid claims data–specifically data from the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) and Medicaid…
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…