Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Many researchers are interested in how cost sharing impacts health care utilization, cost and patient outcomes. This is especially true as high-deductible health plans (HDHP) have become more common in the US. In 2023, 29% of covered workers in the US had a HDHP. One helpful type of data for analyzing HDHPs is claims data.…
For the past few years, some economists have claims that increases in income inequality are due to increased cost of employee benefits such as health insurance. For instance, let’s say that health insurance cost $10,000 per worker. Workers with a wage of $20,000 have total compensation of $30,000 including benefits, and workers with wages of…
Merrill Goozner of GoozNews writes the following: The share of health care costs borne by individuals has remained fairly steady over the past several decades, and that is the prime argument behind conservative and economist claims that making patients have “more skin in the game” will drive health care costs lower. That ignores the fact…
In this blog, I have written about the Swiss (part one, part two) and Dutch healthcare system extensively. Both systems have a “regulated competition” where insurance is mandatory and insurance companies are mandated to provide a specific insurance benefit package. In the Swiss system, 85% of medical expenditures are financed by insurance premiums and 15%…