Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
When you buy a car, there is the sticker price and what you actually paid after haggling with the dealer over discounts. For pharmaceuticals, the media typically reports on list prices which are analogous to the “sticker price” for cars. However, what really matters is the net price, which is the price after discounts and…
Medicare Part D has had a very odd benefit structure. First, you have a deductible with no coverage; then you get some coverage, then there is a coverage gap or “donut hole” with no coverage and finally there is very generous coverage in the ‘catastrophic phase’. This structure was espeically problematic for patients with high…
Part of the Affordable Care Act mandated a medical loss ratio (MLR) for health plans in the individual and small group markets. What this means is that if the MLR is 80% and insurers charge $100 in premiums, plan enrollees must receive $80 in services on average. If they do not (say they only receive…
A paper by Lurie et al. (2021) provides the answer. They reach four conclusions from their analysis: First, the actual penalty paid per uninsured month is less than half the statutory amount. Second, nonetheless, we find visually clear and statistically significant responses to both extensive margin exposure to the mandate and to marginal increases in…
Why don’t people eligible for health insurance exchange plans (i.e., Obamacare plans) enroll? One reason could be that they value the health insurance benefit at less than the cost. Another reason could be behavioral frictions; informational search costs and psychological frictions are costly and may preclude enrollment even when benefits are more than cost. For…
Clearly, causality is difficult to determine here as we can’t have a counterfactual world with no ACA. At the same time, a paper by Buntin and Graves (2020) makes the case the suggestive evidence indicates that the answer is ‘yes’. …[health] expenditures now account for 17.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, compared to…
What do physicians thing about the ACA? How have these opinions changed over time? These are the questions that a paper by Riordan et al. (2019) in Health Affairs. The authors surveyed physiicans in both 2012 and 2017 and found that the share of physicians who thought the ACA was good for health care increased…
One piece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated that health insurance plans for individuals with yearly premiums exceeding $10,200 or family health insurance plans with premiums exceeding $27,500 would be subject to a tax. The tax originally was set to start in 2018, but has since been postponed to 2022. The Kaiser Family Foundation…
How did Medicaid expansion affect prescription drug use? At first glance, one would think that prescriptions increased; more insurance lowers patient out-of-pocket cost so we would expect more prescriptions. Medicaid insurance may crowd out other forms of insurance; if those other forms of insurance covered more drugs, then perhaps utilization would go down. A study…
As reported in NPR: A federal judge in Texas issued a ruling Friday declaring the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, apparently setting the stage for another hearing on the health care law by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor invalidates what’s commonly referred to as Obamacare nationwide, and casts into…