Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
Conventional wisdom holds that in recent years the answer is ‘yes’, however what does the data show? A paper by Nipay, Richards and Penso (2018) uses an SK&A survey of physician office practices between 2007 and 2017 to find the answer. In short, conventional wisdom is largely true with the caveat that there is significant…
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…
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,”…
The answer: more competition leads to more technology adoption. This is the finding from a study by Karaca-Mandic et al. (2016). They use data from 100% Medicare claim in 2003 and 2004 as well as linked information on hospitals [American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey] and physicians [American Medical Association (AMA) Masterfile]. Competition is measured two…
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…
The answer to this question is not so clear cut. Comparing outcome for patients living in Beverly Hills and those in South Los Angeles may be different not only due to health care spending but also due to the patient socioeconomic factors that affect health outcomes. To get around this econometric challenge, an interesting paper…
The popularity of home births has been rising in recent years. One question is whether they are as safe as in-hospital births. A new study in NEJM found that most home births are safe, but hospital births are safer. As the N.Y. Times reports: The study analyzed nearly 80,000 pregnancies in Oregon, and found that…
How do health care costs vary across the country. Although the team at the Dartmouth Atlas has done this exercise with patients in Medicare, there has been less study of region variation in health care spending among the privately insured with the notable exception of a 2013 Institute of Medicine report. In a study by…
AHRQ has put together a nice infographic, which I show below.