Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The popularity of specialty medical facilities (SMF) has increased over the years. The number of Medicare-certified ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) has doubled to 3,371 during the past decade. A question remains: are these “Focused Factories” good for society? In an article by Casalino, Devers and Brewster, (“Focused Factories…“) the authors try to answer this question.…
A frequent topic of investigation in health economics is to estimate the elasticity of the demand for medical procedures with respect to wait times. A paper by Martin, Rice, Jacobs and Smith in the Journal of Health Economics uses quarterly data from 200 English hospitals between 1995-2002 in order to separately estimate the supply and…
Approximately one year ago today, I wrote about whether or not non-profit hospitals should be tax exempt (“Should Non-Profit Hospitals get a Tax Break?“). Generally, I concluded that they should not. Flash forward to March 2007 and we see that The New York Times has an article titled “In Shriner Spending, A Blurry Line of…
Most economists believe preferences are monotonic. This means that economic researchers believe the more of something you have (e.g.: money, burritos, cars, friends, etc.) the more well-off you become. This assumption likely holds if we view health as an argument in a person’s utility function; more health generally makes people better off. Putting ‘medical services’…
It is often very difficult to determine price data for various medical procedures. With the exception of Medicare or Medicaid data, hospitals often do not publish their prices for each service and even when the prices are provided they rarely correspond to the true prices paid. Published prices often do not take into account different…
The University of California San Diego (UCSD) is where I currently attend graduate school. The UCSD Medical Center has been in some hot water lately. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services has alleged that UCSD has overcharged Medicare $48 million for pension costs. According to a UCSD Guardian…