Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the topic of a commentary by Carroll et al. (2022) in Health Services Research. The first issue they discuss is access to care. A core challenge in rural communities is declining access to hospital care. Eight percent of rural hospitals have closed over the last decade, and closure rates have increased in recent…
That is the conclusion from a recent report from some of my colleagues at FTI Consulting’s Center for Healthcare Economics and Policy. In the report titled “Protecting the Pipeline: How a Public Option Could Impact Our Nation’s Health Care Workforce“. An excerpt and some empirical findings are below. …government rate setting under a public option…
The answer is, ‘not very’. That is according to a paper from Burman et al. (2022). Let’s say you want to schedule an appointment with a physician in your areas that is covered by your insurance. When you look up the physician, maybe you have found that the phone number no longer works, or that…
How do efficiently is care provided for patients at Veteran Affairs’ hospitals as compared to private hospitals? This is not an easy question to answer as the composition of patients differs between these hospitals. Even among dually-eligible individuals–those with both VA and commercial insurance–individuals treated at VA hospitals are generally more severely ill. To better…
Interesting study from Hegland et al. (2022) in HSR. The authors used data from Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), American Hospital Association Survey, Hospital Compare, and American Community Survey data and find that: Non-Hispanic Black individuals live in zip codes supplied, on average, 0.11 more beds per 1000 population (SE = 0.01) than places where non-Hispanic…
Recently the CBO published a report compared the rates public and private insurers pay to hospitals for inpatient services, for services at hospital outpatient departments (HOPD), and at ambulatory surgical centers (ASC). A recent RAND report aims to do a similar exercise but contributes to the literature by using updated data from more states, allowing…
In the past months, many hospitals and other health care providers have noted the steep rise in the cost of hiring nurses. Many providers saw double digit year-on-year growth of nurse wages. For instance, some health systems in Louisiana saw a 16% rise in labor costs between 2021 and 2020. In large part, much of…
A paper by Ge et al. (2022) aims to answer this question with a discrete choice experiment survey of medical students at Shandong University in China. Respondents had to select a preferred treatment which varied over 3 dimensions: profit to the physician, patient health benefit, and patient financial cost. The paper abstract is below: The…
As the rates of COVID-19 increased the burden on hospitals in the early months of the pandemic, hospitals were decry a lack of beds and pressure on staff. While COVID-19 is of course a very acute case of over-crowding, a more general question is how much does hospital crowding impact health outcomes. A paper by…
Not surprisingly, the impact is significant. That is according to a study by Malone et al. (2022), estimated using a difference-in-difference design with data between 2001 and 2018. Specifically, they find: Of the 1759 nonmetro counties in our study sample, 109 experienced a hospital closure during the study period. Relative to the nonclosure counterfactual, closures…