Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Based on some recent reports, hospital finances in 2022 look poor. Government cash infusions from COVID-19 were helpful during the pandemic but have largely disappeared. At the same time, costs for labor and supplies have risen. Adding on to these financial pressures is the recent rise in the number of RSV cases. According to a…
Not surprisingly, the impact is significant. That is according to a study by Malone et al. (2022), estimated using a difference-in-difference design with data between 2001 and 2018. Specifically, they find: Of the 1759 nonmetro counties in our study sample, 109 experienced a hospital closure during the study period. Relative to the nonclosure counterfactual, closures…
In many countries including the US and England, hospitals are paid by payers (i.e., commercial insurers and governments) on a per-admission basis with more reimbursement for treating patients with more severe conditions and lower reimbursement for treating patients with less severe conditions. This system is known in the U.S. as the diagnosis-related group (DRG) system,…
The Public Health Service Act (PHSA) in 1992, created a program to allow hospitals providing care for underserved communities to be able to access discounted drugs. The program–known as the 340B Drug Pricing Program, has been described as follows: …[The] law requires pharmaceutical manufacturers participating in the Medicaid program to enter into a second agreement…
That is the question asked by Horwitz and Nichols (2022) in their paper out this week in Health Affairs. I summarize their paper below. Data The authors use data from 2014-2019 American Hospital Association (AHA) annual member surveys among all acute care hospitals (both general medical and surgical) located within urban metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs)…
New regulation is making hospital prices available to patients. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reports: As of January 1 of this year, hospitals are required to post prices of common health services on their websites via consumer-friendly tools for patient use. Prior to implementation of this rule, hospitals were only required to publish their gross,…
Health care costs are high in the U.S., making up 17.9% of the U.S. economy. The Economist reports on recent key drivers of US health care cost…and the answer isn’t drugs. Mr Trump has correctly identified a big villain behind health-care cost inflation, and it is not Big Pharma. Hospitals account for over 30% of…
Perhaps according to Austin Frakt. He writes in JAMA Forum: In every year since 2011, more hospitals have closed than opened…For example, 15 of the 21 hospitals that closed in 2016 were in rural communities, and since 2010, nearly 90 rural hospitals have done so. Hundreds more are at risk of closure.One source of financial challenges to…
A number of studies (e.g., Wasfy et al. 2017, Desai et al. 2016) have found that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) reduce hospital readmissions. However, are these findings valid? A recent paper by Ody et al. (2019) argues maybe not. Because readmission rates are risk-adjusted, changing coding…
This is basically the question that Perez and Freedman (2018) ask. They find the following: Among crowdsourcing sites’ best‐ranked hospitals, 50–60% were also the best ranked on [Hospital Compare’s] HC’s overall and patient experience ratings; 20% ranked as the worst. Best‐ranked hospitals had significantly better clinical quality scores than worst ranked hospitals, but were not…