Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
According to a Health Economics paper by Alice Chen, Anthony Lo Sasso, and Michael R. Richards, the answer is ‘yes’. According to their study: We leverage a unique dataset on New York physicians to analyze if and how the Great Recession impacted the labor market of physicians who have completed their residency and fellowship training and are…
Are physicians ready for value-based payment? That is the question a recent paper by Markovitz et al. (2017) attempts to answer. This question is not hypothetical as the Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (MACRA) requires physicians to choose between the current fee-for-service structure under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) or…
Depending on the source, 34% to 59% percent of physicians are employed in practices of less than 10 physicians. On the other hand, 39% of physicians are employed by hospitals. How will these proportions change over time? An interesting paper by Casalino (2017) examines the impact of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) on…
Interesting facts from Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution: One percent of all the physicians in the United States come from the six countries targeted in Donald Trump’s new Executive Order. I found that a surprisingly high number. According to the Immigrant Doctors Project, those 7000 physicians provide 14 million doctors’ appointments each year and many of them…
This is the finding of Muhlestein and Smith (2016): The proportion of physicians in groups of nine or fewer dropped from 40.1 percent in 2013 to 35.3 percent in 2015, while the proportion of those in groups of one hundred or more increased from 29.6 percent to 35.1 percent during the same time period. Initiatives requiring…
Each year, more than $15 billion of taxpayers’ money is spent to support physicians in residency training. About one-third of this amount comes from Medicaid, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Health Resources and Services Administration. The remaining nearly $10 billion flows through the Medicare program, primarily to academic medical centers via a complex…
A study by Glied, Ma and Pearlstein (2015) says the answer is no. High worker wages are a reasonable place to start for explaining why US healthcare costs are so much higher than other countries as about half of healthcare spending is spent worker compensation. The study by Glied, Ma and Pearlstein does find that:…
A paper by Li and Laxminarayan (Health Econ forthcoming) examines an interesting question: Are physicians sensitive to drug prices faced by their patients? In an ideal world, physicians act as perfect agents for their patients, taking into consideration their medical needs and financial constraints. In reality, the choice of drug and whether a generic or brand-name…
Some background: Created in March 2007, the PQRI established a financial incentive for eligible healthcare professionals to participate in a voluntary quality reporting program. By reporting on a minimum of 3 measures on a specified group of patients, a physician can earn a bonus payment of 0.5% on all of their Medicare billing for 2012.…