Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
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,…
China has been transitioning from a fee-for-service (FFS) payment system to a Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) payment system for hospitals in various cities. Under the FFS model, hospitals were reimbursed for each individual healthcare service provided, which created incentives to increase the number of services during a patient’s hospitalization. In June 2019, the National Healthcare Security…
That is the clever title of recent American Economic Review publication by Cyrus Aghamolla, Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Xuelin Li, Richard T. Thakor. The abstract is below. This study examines the link between credit supply and hospital health outcomes. We use bank stress tests as exogenous shocks to credit access for hospitals that have lending relationships with…
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) increased their required premerger reporting requirements for any healthcare providers such as hospitals. Healthcare Dive reports: Thursday’s update marks the first time the FTC has revised its Hart-Scott-Rodino Act premerger notification form in nearly 50 years.The law is intended to alert officials of companies’ intent to merge and…
This questions may be harder to answer than it may seem. While some physicians are fully independent, and others are full employees, other physicians can be affiliated with hospitals, without being hospital-employed. There are various approaches for measuring whether a physician is integrated within a hospital system: Basic TIN-based measure. The standard approach to identifying…
The 340B Drug Pricing Program is a federal initiative designed to help certain healthcare providers, known as “covered entities,” stretch their resources to better serve vulnerable and underserved patient populations. Created in 1992, the program requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell outpatient drugs at significantly discounted prices (typically 25% to 50% off) to eligible hospitals, clinics,…
That is the topic from a recent study by Hayes et al. (2024): Payments for some diagnostic scans undertaken in outpatient settings were unbundled from Diagnosis Related Group based payments in England in April 2013 to address under-provision. Unbundled scans attracted additional payments of between £45 and £748 directly following the reform. We examined the…
In countries that have universal health insurance, but limited patient out-of-pocket costs for public hospital services, non-urgent hospital treatment often has a waiting list in public hospitals. To address this issue, some countries (e.g., UK, Canada) use strategies such as setting maximum wait targets, monitoring provider performance, or adding public funding; other countries (e.g., Australia,…