Nursing Home Quality

Typically, Nursing Home quality is measured using metrics from Nursing Home Compare. These metrics are calculated based on survey and certification processes and resident assessments from from the Minimum Data Set (MDS). These, however, are not the only quality metrics one can use. For instance, one can use consumer complaints as a measure of quality…

Medicare Spending Growth Slows

Rick Kronick and Rosa Po report that per capita Medicare spending levels have slowed in recent years. Expenditures per Medicare beneficiary increased by only 0.4% in fiscal year 2012, substantially below the 3.4% increase in per capita GDP (Exhibit 1). The very slow growth in Medicare spending in fiscal year 2012 follows slow growth in…

Increasing Demand for Liver Transplants

The Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) is the most common blood-borne infection and cause of liver disease requiring transplantation in the U.S. More than one percent of Americans has a chronic HCV infection. As I describe in a series of posts, individuals with HCV are much more likely to develop cirrhosis and up to 5% will…

Free Money for Amgen

The language buried in Section 632 of the [American Taxpayer Relief] law delays a set of Medicare price restraints on a class of drugs that includes Sensipar, a lucrative Amgen pill used by kidney dialysis patients. The provision gives Amgen an additional two years to sell Sensipar without government controls. The news was so welcome…

Are U.S. Drug Prices Really Too High?

Cabrales and Jiménez-Martín (2013) answer this question using the IMS MIDAS international database between 1998 and 2003.  They find that: …there is a systematic and quantitatively large division between a group of less regulated countries whose average prices are higher and a group of more regulated ones where the average price level is lower. This difference…