Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How did the number of pediatrician and family medicine physician (FMP) change between 2010 and 2020, particularly for rural areas? A paper by Ramesh and Yu (2023) use data from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Area Health Resources Files and and county characteristics from the American Community Survey and find that: From 2010…
That is the topic of a recent paper Tyan, Lam and Milligan (2023). Using newly created database from financial databases combined with press releases, news sources, clinic websites, and financial 10-K reports, the authors found that: During 2003 to 2022, 724 oncology clinics (53% radiation, 32% medical, 15% multi-oncologic) became affiliated with a PE-backed platform…
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…
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…
Many people might know that generally the answer is commercial health plans have the most generous reimbursement compared to government plans. However, a key question is how much more do they pay? Commercial vs. Medicare rates A January 2022 report by the Congressional Budget Office finds that commercial payers reimburse hospitals at 223% of Medicare…
According to a paper by Rodriguez et al. (2022), the answer is ‘yes’. They use data from the 2017–18 National Survey of Healthcare Organizations and Systems (NSHOS), to determine if a physician practice has a “robust set of care management capabilities.” The specific capabilities that were used to determine whether the health system was robust…
The concept of moral hazard is well-known. If patients pay a small share of drug or other medical cost, they may decide to overuse such services. Physicians, however, may also have an incentive to overprescribe if either their reimbursement is tied to prescriptions written. For instance, CMS pays physicians 103% of wholesale acquisition cost (WAC)…
Alternative payment models (APM) are the new trend of the past few decades. High quality, efficient providers should be paid more; low-quality, less efficient providers should be paid less. These APM reimbursement arrangements, however, are typically paid at the health system level and it is unclear whether these incentives trickle down to individual physicians. A…
Over time, physicians are less likely to operate in solo or small group practices. In fact, the share of physician-owned practices has fallen below 50% in recent years. A key question then is how does a physician’s environment or the group they have join affect their practice patterns? Previous research has found that a physician’s…