Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This is the question put forth in a paper by Chen et al. (2017). The authors examine Medicare’s Acute Care Episode (ACE) Demonstration Program, which was a small, voluntary episode-based bundled payment program. According to the CMS website, There were 28 cardiac and 9 orthopedic inpatient surgical services and procedures included in the bundled payment demonstration. These…
How do value-based purchasing programs affect hospitals’ bottom lines? This is a particularly important question as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandates that CMS reward high-quality, low-cost hospitals with bonuses and give financial penalties to low-quality, high-cost hospitals. In 2003, CMS began a pay-for-performance (P4P) demonstration. Using this demonstration as a natural experiment, Kruse et…
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, physician home visits in the U.S. were very common. In fact, the home was the primary place where medicine was practiced. Because physician wages at this time were comparable to those of the average laborer, a market which forced physicians to internalize the time and transportation costs to…