Friday Links
Google Body? Negotiate without being a pushover. Things you didn’t know about income taxes. Tax deductions economists hate. Drawbacks of EMRs. Pharma productivity crisis?
Month: April 2015
What is MIPS?
Yesterday I posted about MIPS, the new Medicare physician reimbursement program set to begin in 2019. The Health Affairs blog provides a nice summary of some of the changes. First and probably most importantly, the formulaic approach to setting base payment rates is gone, replaced with automatic increases for all doctors from 2015 through 2019. For…
‘Doc fix’ fixed?
This may be the case. Fox News reports: The Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation permanently overhauling how Medicare pays physicians late Tuesday in a rare show of near-unanimity from Congress. The legislation headed off a 21 percent cut in doctors’ Medicare fees that would have taken effect Wednesday, when the government planned to begin processing physicians’…
On being well-informed
HT: Justin Wolfers via The Incidental Economist.
Robots vs. Physicians?
The Economist reports that adverse events occur relatively frequently when physicians insert catheters: placing needles inside veins deep in the body is notoriously difficult. Some 15-30% of attempts suffer complications, mainly punctured arteries that can lead to infection (around 250,000 cases in America annually), but also bleeding, collapsed lungs and even cardiac arrest. Failure rates in…
4 Questions
It is currently Passover, the Jewish celebration of the Exodus from Egypt. One of the many traditions at the Passover Seder is to read the 4 questions. Here at the Healthcare Economist, I will also bring you 4 questions…health-care related questions that is on some of the more interesting topics from the past week. Everyone…
Medicaid Expansion and States’ bottom line
A recent RWJF Issue Brief notes that states that expanded Medicaid received more revenue from the federal government and had less state-level spending on programs that support the uninsured. In examining Medicaid expansion across eight states—Arkansas, Colorado, Kentucky, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia—it is clear that states are realizing savings and revenue…
Quality-Adjusted Cost Of Care
One of my paper (along with co-authors Darius Lakdawalla, Claudio Lucarelli, Sean Nicholson, Zeba M. Khan and Tomas J. Philipson) was published at Health Affairs. The title of the study is: Quality-Adjusted Cost Of Care: A Meaningful Way To Measure Growth In Innovation Cost Versus The Value Of Health Gains. The abstract is below. Technology drives both…
Does your doc want to be in an ACO?
The answer is likely “It depends.” To see why this is the case, let us consider the case of some proposed health reforms in Switzerland to force physicians into managed care (MC) networks. As described in Rischatsch (2015): In 2012, Switzerland held a referendum…aimed at encouraging the nationwide development of MC networks. Among other changes…the legal…
Friday Links
Measuring healthcare prices. Negative findings. The overdose. The end of the independent doc? Does parenting skills make a difference: yes vs. no.