Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A new study by Choi et al. (2020) compares the health of individuals aged 55-64 in the US compared to England. They use data from Health and Retirement Study (HRS)–in the US–and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) for 2008-2016. Health is measured across 16 outcomes: 5 self-assessed outcomes, 3 directly measured outcomes, and…
A paper by Frew and Breheny (2019), aimed to answer this question by conducting a Delphi Panel of English and Welsh decision makers who allocated funding for public health for local government. Unsurprisingly, cost, health outcomes and quality of life were the most important factors. Beyond these top 3 factors, interventions’ impact on productivity and…
Typical hours when illness strikes is 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. In the US, typical physician hours are 9-5, Monday through Friday. Although this is changing (CVS Minute Clinics have Saturday and Sunday hours), it is still difficult for individuals who are work and are ill to see a doctor without taking…
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is well known for providing free care to all its citizens. However, will £0 out-of-pocket payments be a thing of the past? Maybe so according to a recent survey of UK Members of Parliament (MPs). Pharmafile reports: In response to the question “if the challenges facing the NHS are…
General Practitioners (GPs) in the UK NHS are paid a mixture of capitation, lump sum allowances, and a pay-for-performance bonus. The P4P element, the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), rewards GPs according to their performance on a large number of indicators. QOF payments represented up to 20% of GPs ’ income in the first year…
On Wednesday, many of the NHS workers went on strike. Seven thousand of the day’s 30,000 operations were cancelled. Why are workers striking? One reason is pensions. According to a new government plan, workers would be required to increase their pension contributions 3.2 percentage points without seeing an increase in the value of their pensions. Additionally,…
Health Reform in the U.S. means more government involvement in health care. More public insurance (expanding Medicaid), more government intervention in the insurance market (health exchanges), and government being a driving force for innovation (the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation). In the UK on the other hand, “Health Reform” means more privatization, not less. As…
Is health reform coming to the UK? Since the middle of the decade, the NHS has used a tariff system which pays a fixed price per procedure. Now, however, the Financial Times, reports that the UK plans for “public and private hospitals to compete on price for the treatment of NHS patients.” The reform calls…
The cost of running a hospital in New York City is much higher than running a hospital in Bozeman, Montana. To take into account these cost differences, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has created a wage index to adjust the inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS) for differences in labor costs. However, the…
A paper by Sutton, Elder Guthrie and Watt (2010) describes the UK’s National Health Service’s (NHS) adoption of the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) in April 2004. In general, P4P programs can have positive or negative spillovers. An example of a positive spillover would be the adoption of EMR to comply with certain P4P initiatives,…