Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What is the impact of being insured on health outcomes? This is a difficult question to answer in part because of adverse selection (e.g., sicker patients may choose to be insured). But even absent adverse selection, the ability to diagnosis a disease may vary between the insurer and uninsured. Consider this example from Kaliski (2023):…
Quality of care often is seen as how physicians and other health care providers treat patients with a given disease. Accurately diagnosing the disease a patient has, however, is in almost all cases a necessary condition to provide high-quality treatment. Nevertheless, a physician’s ability to accurately diagnose a disease is rarely measured within exsting quality…
The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. However, you may be surprised at the frequency with which doctors make mistakes according to a recent article in JAMA. The study reports that more than 2 in 5 patients receives at least one misdiagnosis. In 190 cases, a total of 68 unique diagnoses were missed. Most missed diagnoses were…
Many health insurers (public and private) reimburse doctors based on the patient’s diagnosis. If you treat a patient for a more severe illness during a inpatient stay, Medicare pays you more money. Physicians use procedures to bill insurers for the care they provided. How do insurers know the patient’s diagnosis and the procedures providers perform?…