Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Are quality based incentive programs the solution for improving physician quality without increasing cost? While I believe that measuring quality is an important avenue by which quality can be improved, it is not a magic bullet. A study by Gilmore, et al. (HSR 2007) looks at a pay-for-performance scheme developed in Hawaii. The authors look…
The Washington Post (“Senate likely to Back…“) reports that the Senate will support a plan to remove the legislative barriers against the importation of pharmaceuticals from other countries. According to the article: “The provision would allow consumers to buy prescription drugs from Canada and permit commercial distributors to obtain them from Canada, Japan, Austria, Switzerland…
The RAND health insurance experiment (HIE) demonstrated that increasing coinsurance rates decreases medical care utilization. The HIE also found that health outcomes did not vary between individuals with high, low and zero coinsurance rates. A working paper by Chandra, Gruber and McKnight (“Patient Cost Sharing…“) re-examines whether or not this is the case using a…
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is available at Hank Stern’s InsureBlog.
The concept of diminishing return is one that pervades much of economics. A Health Affairs article (“U.S Health Care Spending…“) by health economist Uwe Reinhardt and co-authors claims that since the U.S. spends more per-person on health care, the marginal benefit of any treatment is low due to diminishing returns. This hypothesis got me thinking…
A working paper by Yolanda K. Kodrzycki and Pingkang David Yu of the Boston Fed attempts to rank economic journals according to their: 1) impact within the Economics field, 2) overall impact, 3) Policy Impact and 4) impact on non-economic journals. The top 10 journals in each category are as follows: Within Economics Overall Impact…
When constructing policy, we are often faced by an equity-efficiency tradeoff. For instance, increasing welfare benefits will increase equity but may reduce a poor individual’s incentive to work if the welfare benefits are tied to having low income. A recent NBER working paper by the nobel laureate James Heckman and co-author Dimitriy Masterov (“…Investing in…
“…in a similar way, the slow growth of the coloring industry in the U.S. before the First World War was largely due to patent protection: most patents were held by the large German companies, such as Bayer, BASF, Hoechst and IG Farben. The chemical industry in the US was so underdeveloped, that during the First…
The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) is a “not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality.” One of their major initiatives is the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) which aims to evaluate the quality of care offered by various health plans. In a 2001 NBER working paper (“Learning…“), researchers Michael Chernew,…
âCan you imagine if a Wal-Mart store operated like Americaâs health care system? You would walk into the store and there would be a huge array of merchandise. But you would not be able to tell the products apart. You would not know how much they cost. And in the end, you would not know…