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…
That is the finding from a paper by Geruso, Layton and Wallace (2023). They exploit the random assignment of approximately 70,000 Medicaid beneficiaries to Medicaid managed care (MMC) plans from 2008 to 2012 in New York City. In short, beneficiaries in New York who did not actively choose a plan within a designated choice period…
An interesting study by Chen et al. (2017) examines the cost of cancer care among Medicare patients. Using SEER-Medicare data of people diagnosed with cancer between 2007 and 2011, they found: Over the year of diagnosis, mean per-patient annual Medicare spending varied substantially by cancer type: $35,849 for breast cancer, $26,295 for prostate cancer, $55,597…
A number of studies have claimed that increased health expenditures may result in no better, or even worse outcomes. For instance, a paper by Fisher et al. (2003) looking at patients with acute myocardial infarction, colorectal cancer, or hip fracture finds that “Quality of care in higher-spending regions was no better on most measures and…
Healthcare Triage reviews a recent publication in JAMA that describes health care spending in detail. A nice summary.
A paper by Sebastian Salas-Vega and Elias Mossialos attempts to answer this question looking at nine countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States) using data between 2004 and 2014. They find that: All nine countries—most notably France and Japan—witnessed an improvement in neoplasm-related years of potential life lost,…
The answer to this question is not so clear cut. Comparing outcome for patients living in Beverly Hills and those in South Los Angeles may be different not only due to health care spending but also due to the patient socioeconomic factors that affect health outcomes. To get around this econometric challenge, an interesting paper…
In the U.S., the answer is largely the government. An NBER paper by Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, and Jeremy McCauley provide some helpful statistics using data from 1996 to 2010 waves of the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). The government pays for two-thirds of health care spending by the elderly, with Medicare…
Politico.com has an interesting series of articles titled Obamacare 2.0, which examines different perspectives on how to improve the Affordable Care Act. One common theme in about half the articles is that the ACA does not do enough to cut healthcare spending. The rise in healthcare spending over the past few decades has been significant. In…
Many times I have been asked whether the Affordable Care Act is a good thing. The 1 sentence answer is: “Yes, because it expands health insurance coverage to more Americans, but no because it adds many layers of regulation and does little to slow cost growth.” This last point is rearing its ugly head. Sally Pipes…