HWR is Wright this week
Brad Wright has posted Health Wonk Review: August Recess Edition at Wright on Health.
Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Brad Wright has posted Health Wonk Review: August Recess Edition at Wright on Health.
Getting Obamacare subsidies may be too easy or too hard depending on your perspective. From MSN: In May 970,000 people had citizenship data errors in their Obamacare applications. As of August, 450,000 of those cases have been resolved, 210,000 are in progress and 60,000 new documents arrive every day. The 310,000 remaining applicants will receive…
In pay-for-performance (P4P) or value-based purchasing (VBP) schemes, health care provider reimbursement rates depend on performance. Physicians can receive bonuses for following best practices, and hospitals can increase reimbursement rates from Medicare if they improve clinical processes and patient satisfaction. As an economist, rewarding good performance with financial payments makes perfect sense. Or does it?…
Obamacare mandates that individuals need to buy health insurance or else they will face a financial penalty. This threat, however, is not credible unless there are affordable health insurance options for most Americans. What are states doing to hold down health insurance rates in the ACA’s health insurance exchanges? A RWJF working paper provides some…
CVS’s Minute Clinic isn’t the only game in town for quick primary care visits anymore. Wal-Mart is getting into the primary care game with $40 office visits with nurse practitioners. MSN Money reports: Wal-Mart is making its long-awaited move into delivering primary care: The retailer has quietly opened half a dozen primary care clinics across South Carolina and Texas…
End animal testing? Limits on generality. “It’s not proof of an efficiency gain, but it’s a necessary condition for one.” Penalty shoot-out before overtime? 20% of near-elderly have no retirement savings
This is the finding from a CBO working paper by Stocking et al. (2014). They use measure how plan bids change as the number of plans in an area change controlling for year, region, plan sponsor fixed effects, whether the plan was a Medicare Advantage Part D Plan (MA-PD), and whether the plan has a…
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Jaan Sidorov’s Population Health Blog. Check it out!
Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so…
Between 2000 and 2007 annual health expenditures in the US grew by 6.6% per year. Between 2008 and 2011, however, the growth rate was only 3.3 percent per year. Are structural changes (e.g., the ACA) helping cause the slowdown? According to Dranove et al. (2014), the answer is likely ‘no’. The authors use new data…