Why don’t physicians accept Medicaid patients?

One reason is that reimbursement rates for Medicaid are lower than for Medicare or commercial insurance. Another (often overlooked) factor, however, is physician’s risk of payment denials and the administrative hassle they face trying to get reimbursed by Medicaid. A paper by Dunn et al. (2024)–cleverly named “A Denial a Day Keeps the Doctor Away“–shows…

RIP: Daniel Kahneman

Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman passed away today. His work incorporating psychology into economics through Prospect Theory has been a major advance. From the N.Y. Times obituary: Professor Kahneman delighted in pointing out and explaining what he called universal brain “kinks.” The most important of these, the behaviorists hold, is loss-aversion: Why, for example, does…

Imputing deductibles in claims data

Many researchers are interested in how cost sharing impacts health care utilization, cost and patient outcomes. This is especially true as high-deductible health plans (HDHP) have become more common in the US. In 2023, 29% of covered workers in the US had a HDHP. One helpful type of data for analyzing HDHPs is claims data.…

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