Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In general the answer is yes, but often with some difficulty. AJMC recaps the findings from a the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Quick Stats section from July 21, 2017. 88.9% of primary care physicians said they are accepting new patients, based on 2015 data from the National Electronic Health Records Survey. However,…
In short, the reason is that Medicaid reimbursement rates for providers is too low. Saurabh Jha, however, explains the point a bit more artistically in his Health Care Blog piece. Medicaid pays a cardiologist, with years of training, $25-40 for a consultation to manage a complex patient with multiple comorbidities, on polypharmacy, where the cardiologist…
One of the primary changes in the healthcare system directed by the Affordable Care Act was providing funding for states to expand Medicaid. Many states did so; many others did not. Some states expanded Medicaid but put additional hurdles in front of beneficiaries to receive this coverage at no cost. Consider the case of the State of Iowa.…
The answer may be yes. One of the big inpediments to value-based pricing of pharmaceuticals was that any discount given to any single organization based on outcomes needed to be reflected in the Medicaid price. Since outcomes are subject to random noise, there will inevitably be health plans that end up getting a low price due to worse than expected…
How will Medicaid expansions affect patient access to pharamceuticals? This question is particularly relevant for patients with serious mental illness. The answer is complicated by the increasing presence of Medicaid managed care plans. Increasingly, states have turned to contracts with Medicaid managed care plans in order to better control costs and reduce budgetary uncertainty. However, in…
Does Medicaid use pay-for-performance (P4P) for providers? If so, how does it work? And does it affect quality and cost? These are the questions of interest to Rosenthal et al. (2015) in their study of P4P programs in Alabama, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Although all three focus on physicians, the Alabama program is a “medical home ”…
In the U.S., the answer is largely the government. An NBER paper by Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, and Jeremy McCauley provide some helpful statistics using data from 1996 to 2010 waves of the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). The government pays for two-thirds of health care spending by the elderly, with Medicare…
A physician shortage may be a bit much, but it appears that physicians overestimate their availability based on a study by Coffman et al. (2016). The percentage of callers posing as Medicaid patients who could schedule new patient appointments was 18 percentage points lower than the percentage of physicians who self-reported on the survey that…
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…
Here’s a graphic from the NIHCM foundation summarizing where federal revenues come in an where they are spent. As you can see about one quarter of the budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and ACA Subsidies and another quarter is spent on Social Security. This is not news if you have been reading the Healthcare Economist diligently…