…according to political scientists James G. Gimpel and Frances E. Lee of the University of Maryland, College Park, and Rebecca U. Thorpe, of the University of Washington, the areas of the country hit hardest by the downturn actually got a smaller share of the discretionary portion of the federal goodies than more fortunate regions. How [...]

Although health spending at the national level grew by only 3.9 percent in 2011, state and local health care spending grew by 10 percent. Between 2008 and 2010, state and local health care spending grew by only 3 percent; According to a Pew report, however, the prior trend of decelerating healthcare spending at the state [...]

My new firm, Precision Health Economics (PHE), also produced a report for the IOM’s project on regional variation in health care spending, utilization and quality. PHE’s goal was to synthesize the results across the separte investigations into the Medicare, Medicaid and commercially insured populations. Their findings are the following. In synthesizing the population-specific studies of [...]

The Sequester is here.  Whether you support the sequester or not, failing to reverse the sequester is likely to have large effects on government spending.  If you like big government, you will like the sequester.  If you like small government, you still likely will not like the sequester in principal.  Does it makes sense to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. – Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

The answer is not clear. The key driver of increased cost to California are the broadening eligibility standards for Medicaid (called Medi-Cal in California). Although California recently passed a proposition to increase taxes, California still faces a shortfall of $1.9 billion for fiscal year 2013-14.The L.A. Times reports that ACA cost estimates have varied widely [...]

A recent study use measures of hospital costs to charges to examine changes in inpatient cost between 2001 and 2006.  What did they find? Methods The data come from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State (HCUP) State Inpatient Databases (SID) and Medicare Cost Reports for all community, nonrehabilitation hospitals in nine states.  The nine [...]