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Recent articles

• Thursday Links

  May 24, 2012 in Current Events

  What projects are funded by the CMS Innovation Center? Sick in America. Does drinking coffee improve your health? Diagnostic technology and variation in treatment choices. Healthcare Economist on Find The Best.

• Health Wonk Review

  May 23, 2012 in Carnivals

  Jaan Sidorov of the Disease Management Care Blog hosts this week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review.

• Fixed Effects Logit Estimator and the Incidental Parameter Problem

  May 23, 2012 in Econometrics

  Fixed effects (FE) regressions are a useful tool for controlling for time-invariant factors in a regression specification.  When using a linear OLS model, FE represent the average value of the dependent variable for that individual after controlling for covariates.  Estimating a fixed effects model for non-linear regressions, however, can be problematic. For instance, if you [...]

• Medicare Trustees Report: We’re Fucked

  May 21, 2012 in Uncategorized

  Despite lower costs than previously projected, the Medicare Trust Fund is still in bad shape. he estimated exhaustion date for Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, “…remains at 2024,the same year shown in last year’s report. As in past years…the fund is not adequately financed over the next 10 years. HI expenditures in 2011 were [...]

• Measuring Hospital Efficiency

  May 20, 2012 in Hospitals, Medicare, P4P, Quality

  Medicare recently released the Medicare Spending per Beneficiary (MSPB) measure on Hospital Compare. This measure includes all payments to doctors, hospitals or other facilities for services provided to a patient during the three days before the hospital stay, during the stay, and during the 30 days after discharge from the hospital. Kaiser Health news provides [...]