Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How did health care prices change over the past 2 decades. That is the question a paper by Papanicolas (2024) aims to answer, comparing US prices to those from Australia, Canada, France, and the Netherlands between 2000 and 2020. Before we get to the results, we first need to determine what types of price indices…
It seems like everything just gets more and more expensive. But are prices for medical care declining? Cutler et al. (1998) found in seminal paper “Are medical prices declining? Evidence for heart attack treatments” that while unadjusted prices of medical care were in fact rising, quality-adjusted health care costs actually were falling. In my own…
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…
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,…
Conventional wisdom would hold that the prices are rising…aren’t they? To correctly answer this question, one must define which prices you are talking about. Are we looking at the list price that is widely available or the net price after we take into account discounts are rebates life sciences firms pay? A paper by Sarpatwari…
A paper by Hernandez et al. (2020) in JAMA examines trends in branded drug prices using data from SSR Health between 2007 and 2018. The authors find the following: From 2007 to 2018, list prices increased by 159% (95% CI, 137%-181%), or 9.1% per year, while net prices increased by 60% (95% CI, 36%-84%), or…
As the N.Y. Times reports, more transparency is coming to provider prices. The White House released an executive order Monday afternoon intended to require insurance companies, doctors and hospitals to give patients more information about precisely what their care will cost before they get it. More transparency is generally good and surprise billing for out-of-network costs has been a major…
While the high price of branded drugs often gets a lot of attention in the public, few realize that after patent expiration, prices often plunge dramatically and high quality treatments are available for extremely affordable prices. Granlund and Bergman (2018) estimate the size of this price reduction using data from Sweden. In the long term,…
The effect of health care industry consolidation on prices is a question argued about by many including researchers, economists, anti-trust, lawyers, regulators and more. There is evidence that health plan consolidation increases premiums, and hospital consolidation increases price. For instance, Dafny et al. 2015 writes: The harsh reality is that it’s difficult to find well-documented…
Sarah Kliff of Vox has an interesting article looking at hospital pricing. She provides examples of $629 for a Band-Aid in an emergency department to over $3,000 to look at a bruised finger. Part of these high costs are not just physician time and treatment materials but a facility fee. The facility fee is basically the…