Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
According to my post yesterday, it may seem like the answer is ‘yes’. The US spends by far the most money per person and the largest share of its economy on health care. While cross-country comparisons often grab the headlines, a New England Journal of Medicine Perspective by Katharine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra argues that…
A famous paper by Anderson et al. (2003) attempted to explain why health care in the U.S. is so expensive. The answer: “It’s the prices, stupid.” However, is that really the case? A fascinating blog post on Random Critical Analysis disputes this piece of conventional wisdom. In the U.S., prices certainly have risen. However, they…
The title of this post comes from a speech from Columbia health policy and management professor Lawrence Brown. For years, Presidents and other politicians have noted that rising health care costs will lead to the collapse of the system. Michael Millenson highlights this state of unending crisis in his Health Affairs blog post titled “Half A…
A blog post by Austin Frakt of the Incidental Economist says the answer is yes. In almost every year since the 1960s, health care spending has grown at least as fast as the overall economy, and often much faster. Health economists have long debated why. Strange as it may sound, how we care for our…
Typically, answering this question is difficult as the Medicaid program varies across states and even within states. What Amanda Kowalski and co-authors do in a paper she presented at the 2016 ASSA is collect data on the variation in Medicaid eligibility across states, across demographic groups, and across time from the inception of Medicaid in…
For many years, projections from CMS and CBO have claimed that excess cost growth (i.e., growth in healthcare spending above and beyond the growth in GDP) will slow in the distant future. One reason is mechanical, if current rates continued, healthcare spending at some point would make up the entire economy. The mechanism through which…
Many health policy researchers talk about bending the cost curve; this means reducing the rate of health care spending below GDP growth. U.S. health spending, however, has consistently grown faster than GDP for nearly a century. Woodward and Wang show that this relationship is surprisingly stable over time, even after the advent of large government…
According to Health Affairs, the U.S. spent 16.0% of GDP on health expenditures in 2006. What will we be spending on health care in 2040? Robert Fogel takes a stab at answering this question. He claims that by 2040, the U.S. will spend 29% of GDP on health care in 2040. There are four…