Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a recent paper by Gao, Kim, and Sevilir (2025). The authors examine 1218 hospital merger and acquisition (M&A) deals in the hospital industry between 2001 and 2008. The authors focus solely on M&A deals with for-profit entities as they argue that they want to examine whether private equity (PE) specifically…
China has been transitioning from a fee-for-service (FFS) payment system to a Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) payment system for hospitals in various cities. Under the FFS model, hospitals were reimbursed for each individual healthcare service provided, which created incentives to increase the number of services during a patient’s hospitalization. In June 2019, the National Healthcare Security…
That is the clever title of recent American Economic Review publication by Cyrus Aghamolla, Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Xuelin Li, Richard T. Thakor. The abstract is below. This study examines the link between credit supply and hospital health outcomes. We use bank stress tests as exogenous shocks to credit access for hospitals that have lending relationships with…
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) increased their required premerger reporting requirements for any healthcare providers such as hospitals. Healthcare Dive reports: Thursday’s update marks the first time the FTC has revised its Hart-Scott-Rodino Act premerger notification form in nearly 50 years.The law is intended to alert officials of companies’ intent to merge and…
That is the topic from a recent study by Hayes et al. (2024): Payments for some diagnostic scans undertaken in outpatient settings were unbundled from Diagnosis Related Group based payments in England in April 2013 to address under-provision. Unbundled scans attracted additional payments of between £45 and £748 directly following the reform. We examined the…
In countries that have universal health insurance, but limited patient out-of-pocket costs for public hospital services, non-urgent hospital treatment often has a waiting list in public hospitals. To address this issue, some countries (e.g., UK, Canada) use strategies such as setting maximum wait targets, monitoring provider performance, or adding public funding; other countries (e.g., Australia,…
That is the question asked by a recent NBER working paper by Chandra et al. (2023). This question is important for a variety of reasons. First, quality measure data collection is expensive. Saraswathula et al. 2023 found that Johns Hopkins Hospital had to report 162 unique quality metrics, and the cost for collecting these data…
That may be the case. Modern Healthcare reports: Last month, St. Charles Health System threatened to cut ties with all Medicare Advantage plans next year, a move that would leave an estimated 26,000 local beneficiaries without access to a hospital less than 100 miles away.“The reality of Medicare Advantage in central Oregon is that it…
Yes, this appears to be the case. Medscape reports: In one of the largest healthcare deals to date, Kaiser Permanente is acquiring Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health and investing $5 billion to fold it into a new nonprofit subsidiary called Risant Health, which is set to purchase additional medical groups in coming years.While regulators still must review…
Hospital admissions are typically paid largely based on DRGs. DRGs account for the type of admission (e.g., heart failure, hip fracture, COPD) and some measure of patient characteristics and disease severity. However, should hospital structural factures be incorporated into reimbursement? On the one hand, if the structural factor is a cause of less efficient care,…