VA vs. private hospitals

How do efficiently is care provided for patients at Veteran Affairs’ hospitals as compared to private hospitals? This is not an easy question to answer as the composition of patients differs between these hospitals. Even among dually-eligible individuals–those with both VA and commercial insurance–individuals treated at VA hospitals are generally more severely ill. To better…

Measuring Hospital Quality

Quality of care is difficult to measure. Even if you had a perfect measure of quality in terms of health outcomes, risk adjustment is imperfect. For instance, academic medical centers are often assumed to have high quality, but actual outcomes observed in the data may not be that good if they also receive the sickest,…

Hospital CEO pay

How much are hospital CEOs getting paid? A paper by Mulligan et al. (2020) provides the answer: Between 2010 and 2015, mean hospital CEO compensation (in 2015 US$…) increased 7.8%, from approximately $639,000 to $689,000 (p = .05), and median compensation increased from $431,000 to $464,000. Not surprisingly, CEOs of larger hospitals systems get paid…

Hospital group purchasing and drug prices

Yesterday I noted that competition is key to driving down prices in health insurance markets.  Competition is about expanding the number of suppliers available for a given product.  Now let’s think about the demand side.  Does reducing the number of purchasers increase or decrease price?  One could think that price would fall because buyers would…

Why are hospital prices crazy?

Sarah Kliff of Vox has an interesting article looking at hospital pricing.  She provides examples of $629 for a Band-Aid in an emergency department to over $3,000 to look at a bruised finger. Part of these high costs are not just physician time and treatment materials but a facility fee.  The facility fee is basically the…

Hospital of the future

The Economist‘s recent article “Prescription for the future” describes some new trends in health care treatment and predicts what the hospital of the future will look like.  Some excerpts are below: When I think of the hospital of the future, I think of a bunch of people sitting in a room full of screens and phones,”…

“Adjustments” drive variation in Medicare hospital reimbursement rates

In my previous work, I have examined regional variation in Medicare and Medicaid costs through reports to the Institute of Medicine and publications in peer-reviewed journals.  We found significant variation in health care costs across regions, that high-cost regions tended to remain high cost over time, but that a region that is high-cost for treating one medical condition…