Physician Compensation – Healthcare Economist

Chronic myeloid leukemia treatment intolerance imposes additional resource and economic burden on oncology practices in the United States

2025-12-022025-12-01Jason Shafrin

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…

Are prices driving increases in Medicare spending? Even so, can the government set ‘good’ prices?

2025-08-06Jason Shafrin

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…

US Physicians in 2024: More likely to work in larger, multi-specialty, PE-owned practices

2025-06-032025-06-03Jason Shafrin

These are the findings from the American Medical Association’s 2024 Physician Practice Benchmark Survey. Physicians included in the survey include those who practice in the U.S., actively see patients, and have completed residency. Here is what the survey finds: Increasingly, physicians are less likely to work in small practices that they or other physicians own.…

How big is the 2025 Medicare rate cut for physicians?

2025-01-092025-01-09Jason Shafrin

At the end of last year, CMS finalized a rate cut for Medicare reimbursement to physicians. The CMS Fact Sheet states: …average payment rates under the PFS [Physician Fee Schedule] will be reduced by 2.93% in CY 2025, compared to the average amount these services were paid for most of CY 2024 This sounds like…

What share of physicians are integrated within hospital systems?

2024-09-252024-09-25Jason Shafrin

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…

How will the FTC law banning noncompete clauses impact physicians?

2024-08-302024-08-30Jason Shafrin

As of 2007, about half of physicians had noncompete clauses (“noncompetes” for short) in their contracts. However, a recent FTC rule severely limits when they could be used. What specifically did the new FTC rule say about non-competes? Fuse Brown et al. (2024) provide a helpful summary. The final FTC rule declares all new noncompete clauses or…

Why don’t physicians accept Medicaid patients?

2024-03-28Jason Shafrin

One reason is that reimbursement rates for Medicaid are lower than for Medicare or commercial insurance. Another (often overlooked) factor, however, is physician’s risk of payment denials and the administrative hassle they face trying to get reimbursed by Medicaid. A paper by Dunn et al. (2024)–cleverly named “A Denial a Day Keeps the Doctor Away“–shows…

Financial incentives and prescribing behavior in primary care

2024-01-12Jason Shafrin

That is the title of a paper by Bodnar et al. 2023. A summary of this interesting paper is below. Overview of general practitioners in the UK Under the English National Health Service (NHS) program, …patients register with a single general practice that acts as the gatekeeper to most other NHS services, including non-emergency hospital…

What is better: public or private provision of health care?

2023-11-07Jason Shafrin

This is a question that can be answered empirically but doing so is challenging. While cross-country comparisons are feasible for comparing public and private health care provisions, often there are many other differences between health care systems across country. Within any given country, there is significant selection bias in terms of who receives public vs.…

How does changing capitation share impact service provision in mixed reimbursement environments?

2023-10-11Jason Shafrin

There has been much research showing that fee-for-service (FFS) leads to increased provision of medical services and capitation leads to decreased provision of medical services. My own research shows that there are system-wide effects and that the impact of capitation for primary care physicians on services may depend on whether specialists are also reimbursed via…