Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Many doctors claim that the medical malpractice system is broken and needs to be fixed. Doctors have high malpractice insurance premiums and often practice defensive medicine to protect themselves against lawsuits. To help alleviate this problem, many politicians have asked for some sort of tort reform. Tort reform can be generally categorized into 4 types…
Traditional economic theory suggests that when the price of a good falls, the amount supplied will fall as well. Most economists always assume that the supply curve is upward sloping. But that is not always the case in medical world. Because a physician serves both as the patient’s advisor and the supplier of medical treatment,…
Simon Caulkin, management editor of The Guardian, has a great article titled “The rule is simple: be careful what you measure.” The article discusses the fact that measuring performance leads to better performance on the dimensions measured, but can often lead to significantly worse performance on the unmeasured dimensions. For instance, What happens when bad…
“When regulators or policy makers succeed in improving the quality of care provided by some doctors, do patients even notice and/or care?” This is the question which Kenneth L. Leonard attempts to answer. Davies and Ware (1988) do state that patient satisfaction is correlated with average quality levels. One problem with most studies is that…
Paul Levy, the president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston made about $1 million dollars in 2005. Of this, $650,000 was base salary, $195,000 was made up of incentive bonus, and the balance was composed of compensation for health insurance, life insurance, and retirement. How do I know these figures? Paul…
An Annals of Internal Medicine survey sheds some light on physicians opinions regarding universal health care. Overall 59% of physicians support national health insurance and 32% oppose it. Support for national health insurance increased 10 percentage points since 2002 (49%). Unsurprisingly, surgical subspecialties, anesthesiologists, and radiologists, were the only specialities where more than half of…
A recent article in the Journal of Health Economics found that increasing Medicare reimbursement may have no meaningful effect on hospital use or patient outcomes. “There is widespread concern about the quality of health care in the US, and the effect of provider payments on the quality of care is an important and unsettled issue…
David Williams of the Health Business Blog reviews an article from the Boston Globe (“Immigrants…“) stating that immigrants reduce the cost of health care. How can this be with so many immigrants relying on government programs and free clinics to receive their care? While it is true that immigrants are consumers of medical care, they…
The N.Y. Times (“…No Rhyme or Reason“) has an interesting essay about how doctors financial incentives pressure them to run too many tests on patients and refer them to too many specialists. Doctors are usually reimbursed for whatever they bill. As reimbursement rates have declined in recent years, most doctors have adapted by increasing the…
Most public health officials believe that increasing the supply of primary care doctors is almost always a good thing, while increasing the number of specialists can have mixed results. One problem is that physician supply is endogenous. One may believe that physicians prefer to locate in wealthier areas. If wealthier people are also healthier, then…