Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Many health policy experts believe that when Medicare or Medicaid decrease prices, hospitals will increase the prices they charge to the privately insured. Does this make sense? Ginsburg (2003) summarizes the debate: Most executives in hospitals, physician organizations, health plans, and businesses have long been convinced that reductions in rates paid to Medicare and Medicaid…
Does a fancy hospital interior and soothing music help promote faster healing? Sharp Hospital system certainly things so. NPR’s Marketplace even covers the story: Dan Gross is executive vice president of Sharp Healthcare. I meet up with him in the lobby for my tour of the swanky Sharp Memorial. Its a $200-million hospital in San…
Typically when a business closes, it is a sad event, but one business’s demise often makes way for more efficient competitors to gain market share. This is rarely, how hospital closures are seen, however. In the press, a hospital closure is met with fears of decreased health care access and quality for the local community.…
The US News and World Report has popular rankings for colleges, graduate schools and now hospitals. Do patients actually decide to seek care at different hospitals based on these ratings? Devin Pope attempts to answer this question in a recent Journal of Health Economics article (free draft). To determine whether or not this is the…
Mortality during surgery is dependent on two factors. The first is the probability of having complications during surgery. The second is the probability of dying conditional on having a complication. One would expect that hospitals with low mortality rates would have both fewer complications and lower probability of death conditional on a complication. A…
Much of my own research has focused on how physician financial incentives affect the quantity and quality of medical care. It should come as no surprise that I found a recent New York Times article on the topic stimulating. Dr. Sandjeep Jauhar examines how hospital and physician financial incentives affect the length of a patient’s…
The Denver Post has an interesting article about employee theft of drugs from hospitals. Stealing from a hospital is not easy: “Hospitals guard drugs carefully, requiring staffers to use individual codes or even fingerprints to unlock cabinets where drugs are stored. At Rose [Medical Center], an electronic system tracks narcotics from the time they arrive…
What are hospitals like in the Netherlands? A paper by Blank and Van Hulst (2009) give some insight. The paper studies Dutch general hospitals. These hospitals make up 80% of beds on 70% of hospital costs. Non-general hospitals include academic hospitals and specialty hospitals (e.g., eye clinics and rehabilitation clinics). Hospitals in the Netherlands “Hospitals,…
Four months ago, I wrote that the health care sector added jobs despite the overwhelming job losses in the rest of the economy. Looks like the health care sector has not been fully insulated against the economic woes: ” Six out of ten hospitals nationally are seeing a greater proportion of patients without insurance coming through…
How do hospitals estimate the cost of different inpatient stays? A paper by Clement et al. (2009) reviews 3 techniques: Microcosting. “With microcosting, a detailed list of each component of a patient’s care is created and costed separately for each facet of a patient’s hospitalization. Given the level of detail, microcosting is generally considered the…