health care spending
kkrisberg | May 3, 2016If you’re pregnant and live in Cleveland, Ohio, it’s likely you’ll pay about $522 for an ultrasound. If you live about 60 miles south in Canton, Ohio, it costs about $183 for the same procedure, a recent study found. Why such a significant price difference? Researchers couldn’t single out one overriding factor. But the study does tell us this: place matters when it comes to how much you pay for health care.
The study was published last week in Health Affairs and was based on data from the Health Care Cost Institute, a commercial claims database that includes nearly 3 billion paid claim lines…
kkrisberg | March 25, 2016Here’s what states get when they expand Medicaid: more savings, more revenue, more jobs, more access to care for their communities.
That’s the conclusion from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation issue brief released this month that compared the differences between states that chose to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act and those that opted out. Under the health reform law, the federal government will pay the entire cost of expanding state Medicaid programs up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level through 2016, phasing down to 90 percent by 2020. It’s a pretty good…
kkrisberg | July 10, 2015Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, American women are saving hundreds of dollars on birth control, according to the first study to document the impact of health reform on prescription contraception spending.
To conduct the study, which was published this month in Health Affairs, researchers analyzed claims data from a large national insurer between January 2008 and June 2013, eventually examining data linked to more than 790,800 women. They found that the average out-of-pocket expense decreased for nearly all prescription contraceptive methods on the market. In particular, the average out-of-…
kkrisberg | May 12, 2015More than $30 million in Arkansas, $25.8 million in Kentucky, $105.5 million in Washington and $180 million in Michigan. That’s how much money just four states during just one fiscal year saved under their newly expanded Medicaid programs.
A recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) summarizes the benefits of Medicaid expansions on uninsurance rates, state health care spending and uncompensated care, finding that “contrary to critics’ claims that Medicaid expansion is financially unsustainable for states, there is increasing evidence that expansion has saved states…
kkrisberg | May 8, 2015Just another example of how cuts to health care funding simply shift the costs and endanger people’s health. This time it’s a study on the impact of eliminating adult dental coverage within the California Medicaid program. Not surprisingly, the cut resulted in a significant and immediate rise in people seeking help in hospital emergency departments.
While federal rules require Medicaid programs to cover children’s dental care, covering adult dental care is up to state policymakers. California lawmakers decided to stop offering dental care to adult Medicaid beneficiaries in 2009, which left…
kkrisberg | July 26, 2013With immigration at the forefront of national debate, Jim Stimpson decided it was time to do a little more digging.
"There's a lot of rhetoric around immigrants' use of public services in general and health care specifically, and I thought with impending federal immigration reform it would be useful to have some sort of contribution about the facts of unauthorized immigrants' use of health services in the United States," said Stimpson, a professor within the University of Nebraska's School of Public Health and director of the university's Center for Health Policy.
So together with colleagues…
lborkowski | April 26, 2013by Kim Krisberg
Another day, another study that shows investing in public health interventions can make a serious dent in health care spending.
A new study recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that banning smoking in all U.S. subsidized housing could yield cost savings of about $521 million every year. That total includes $341 million in secondhand smoke-related health care expenditures, $108 million in renovation expenses and $72 million in smoking-attributable fire losses. In fact, just prohibiting smoking in public housing alone would result in a savings…
ddobbs | February 10, 2009Reader Jay, in a comment on my post about health-care costs tanking the economy, raises an interesting question about the sorts of standardized medical records that would be needed to evaluate efficacy (and therefore economic efficiency) of various treatments:
The idea is clearly to have standardized health-care records systems so that data can easily be aggregated and analyzed [he writes, quoting my post.]
That's a shift in priorities, away from records centered around benefit to the patient, a subtle but not insignicant difference. Broad based statistical research involves, though…
ddobbs | February 9, 2009The Times' Economix blog has a good post by Alan Krueger on the need toinclude patients' lost time in estimates of health-care costs.
After waiting more than an hour in a doctor's waiting room, a friend of mine once presented his doctor with a bill for his time..... Although it doesn't currently enter into our national statistics, the time that patients spend getting health care services should be reflected in the way we calculate America's national health care expenditures.....Time spent interacting with the medical system could be used for other activities, like work and leisure. Moreover…
ddobbs | February 9, 2009Check this very scary projection of what current trends in health-care spending will mean for our economy: a growing weight that will account for half of GDP by 2082:
Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, shows that slide in his standard talk on what's wrong with our budget. It shows why, as Ezra Klein puts it,
an odd bedfellows coalition of centrist economists ranging from Dean Baker to Henry Aaron to Paul Krugman to, well, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman have been forcefully arguing that there is no such thing as an "entitlement crisis." Social Security is safe. The crisis is in Medicare.…