Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A helpful reminder of what rebates are for drugs covered under State Medicaid Agencies. ICER reports in their California, based on a helpful summary from the Kaiser Family Foundation: For brand name drugs, the [Medicaid] rebate is 23.1% of Average Manufacturer Price (AMP) or the difference between AMP and “best price,” whichever is greater. Certain…
Gaining insurance through Medicaid is likely to have diverse impacts in terms of how likely disabled individuals are to work. On the one hand, having access to health care may improve health outcomes and better enabled disabled individuals to recover (if they are short-term disabled) or better manage their disability (if they are long-term disabled).…
According to a recent paper by Wallace (2023), the answer is ‘yes’, but it does so in a highly inefficient manner. Using 2008-2012 Medicaid data from the New York State Department of Health, the author find that: Leveraging the random assignment of over 50,000 Medicaid enrollees in New York, I present causal evidence that narrower…
A Health Affairs Forefront article by Johnson and Dieleman (2022) published last week using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS’s) State Health Expenditure Accounts (SHEA) data. A previous study looked at these data through 2014, but the recent publication updates this analysis through 2019. The authors first use a age- and sex-standardized health…
Many people might know that generally the answer is commercial health plans have the most generous reimbursement compared to government plans. However, a key question is how much more do they pay? Commercial vs. Medicare rates A January 2022 report by the Congressional Budget Office finds that commercial payers reimburse hospitals at 223% of Medicare…
Where does the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services see Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) heading in the future. Based on a Health Affairs commentary from Brooks-LaSure and Tsai, the three key priority areas are (1) coverage and access, (2) equity, and (3) innovation and whole-person care. I review each of these…
Clayton 2019 is an interesting study on the impact of drug spending on Medicaid beneficiary mortality levels. The author uses variation in the roll out of Medicaid drug coverage by state across different Medicaid eligible groups in order to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in drug expenditures. Using this approach, Clayton finds that: …a $1 increase…
From a recent article in NBER by Dunn et al. (2021): Observing the back-and-forth sequences of claims’ denials and resubmissions for past visits, we can estimate physicians’ costs of haggling with insurers to collect payments. Combining these costs with the revenue never collected, we estimate that physicians lose 17% of Medicaid revenue to billing problems,…
Poor, elderly individuals who may qualify for both Medicaid (for being poor) and Medicare (for being elderly, blind, disabled or have ESRD). In these cases, Medicaid serves as a supplemental insurer, covering Medicare coinsurance and deductibles. The generosity of this supplemental coverage for so-called ‘dual-eligibles’ varies across states. These differences in Medicaid payments arise from…
Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gave an update to its federal budget projections between 2020 and 2030. As expected, things look grim for 2020. CBO projects a federal budget deficit of $3.3 trillion in 2020, more than triple the shortfall recorded in 2019. That increase is mostly the result of the economic…