Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In a project with the Institute of Medicine (IOM), I examined the sources of regional variation in Medicare and Medicaid spending and spending growth. The IOM wisely concluded that policymakers should target decision-makerss rather than geography when attempting to improve the efficiency of the healthcare system. I recent paper by the Louise Sheniner of the…
In some research I conducted with the Institute of Medicine, we found that there is little relationship between the geographic variation in Medicare and Medicaid spending. Research by Todd Gilmer and Rick Kronick of UC-San Diego conduct their own research using Medicaid data from 2001-2005. Like my own research, they find that a state’s per…
The quality and efficiency of the care patients receive is often determined by the accident of where they live and seek care. – Dartmouth Atlas Brief Within-[region] variation in spending and utilization is significantly larger than the across [region] variation for both Medicare and Medicaid.” – Report for the Institute of Medicine. Which statement is…
Is regional variation in health care spending larger for Medicare beneficiaries or those enrolled in private health plans? Before answering that question, one should better understand the sources of this variation. Regional variation in spending can be due to variation in the utilization, variation in prices, or both. A paper by Philipson et al. (2010)…
How do ecologists determine the size of a population? One method is the mark and recapture (a.k.a. capture/recapture method). This method relies on having two separate trials to capture (either physically or in data) members of certain population and determines the population size based on the proportion of specimens who are captured in both…