Academic Articles & Reports Roundup
May Articles & Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor June 2, 2015
Greetings! For the academics among us, its time to wrap up your end of the year grading and see what you’ve been missing in the literature this month. Two themes came out of the literature in May. First, (no surprise to anyone) the American public continues to be frustrated with the lack of transparency and rationality in healthcare prices, but there are some signs of hope. Second, policymakers and academics have proposed numerous payment reforms, which despite their varying degrees of success, only get at a fraction of the problem. …
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April Articles & Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor May 1, 2015
While April brought us little in the way of showers, it did offer a nice range of articles and reports that focus on competition in health care markets and payment reform initiatives, including accountable care organizations (ACOs). This issue of the Roundup will tackle payment reform initiatives first, then move on to competition, and wrap up with a handful of articles examining state initiatives and opportunities. Payment Reform Initiatives The April academic literature examined the ability of payment reform initiatives, including payment for performance, reference pricing, and provider risk sharing …
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March Articles & Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor April 1, 2015
It’s been a big month in health law! King v. Burwell was argued before the Supreme Court, the House voted to repeal the sustainable growth rate (SGR), a two-year CHIP extension was passed, and the Supreme Court held that physicians did not have the right to sue state Medicaid programs for greater reimbursements in Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center. While you were busy reading about these and countless other developments in our ever changing healthcare system, quite a bit has been published related to healthcare prices and competition. This month’s …
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February Articles & Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor March 2, 2015
In February, we saw assessments of health policy ideas from the level of national health reform right down to very specific cost saving initiatives. This issue of the Roundup will start with the broad and theoretical and move toward the specific. Big picture health reform In Managed Competition in Health Insurance, Stanford economists Liran Einav and Jonathan Levin examine the potential for regulated markets to outperform single payer public insurance. Specifically, they examined the use of managed competition in Medicare as a means of demonstrating how adverse selection and market …
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Featured Paper Review– Certificates of Public Advantage: Can They Address Provider Market Power?
Source Fellow February 19, 2015
By: Evan Sznol, Source Fellow The Source would like to highlight a newly published paper by Urban Institute researchers Randall R. Bovbjerg & Source Advisory Board member Robert A. Berenson with a summary of this important work. In “Certificates of Public Advantage: Can They Address Provider Market Power? (Feb. 2015),” published by the Urban Institute, the authors conducted a case study through interviews with relevant stakeholders to determine the impact of a Certificate of Public Advantage (“COPA”) on healthcare delivery and prices and its utility as a policy tool. …
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January Articles & Reports Round Up
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor February 1, 2015
As the holidays faded, January rang in 2015 with a return to concern about health care costs and the role of the market in health care. A number of reports came out this month on national costs. First and foremost, Health Affairs published National Health Spending in 2013: Growth Slows, Remains in Step with the Overall Economy in its January, 2015 issue. This annual report highlights national spending from the most recent data from CMS Office of the Actuary. In 2013, the U.S. spent $2.9 trillion on health care, about …
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December Articles & Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor January 3, 2015
Happy New Year! The December Roundup is here to help you ease into work and make sure you did not miss anything during all the holiday festivities! We will first highlight a few articles on the role of competition and antitrust enforcement in controlling healthcare costs. If you read one article this month, have it be this one. In the December 11th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Edith Ramirez, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, published Antitrust Enforcement in Health Care—Controlling Costs, Improving Quality. In this article, …
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November Articles & Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor December 1, 2014
We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! As you climb back in to the saddle after the long weekend, we’ll make sure you didn’t miss anything in the Turkey Day excitement. In this issue, we are first going to examine the big picture in American healthcare, then two reports and an article that address issues related to cost from the consumer perspective, and then we will examine a variety of articles related to competition. The Big Picture The November 26th issue of JAMA has articles by some of the …
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October Articles & Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor October 31, 2014
Happy Halloween! October’s roundup focuses on articles examining hospital pricing as well as the new trend toward reference pricing. We’ll also take a peek at a couple of articles on hospital consolidation. Nothing too scary here! Let’s start with hospital pricing. Erin Fuse Brown, Associate Professor at Georgia State University College of Law, published Irrational Hospital Pricing in the Houston Journal of Health Law and Policy earlier this month. Fuse Brown demonstrates the deep irrationality found in most hospital’s chargemaster charges, and then responds to the numerous claims that hospital …
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September Articles and Reports Roundup
Jaime S. King, Executive Editor October 1, 2014
With the end of summer and school in full swing, September brought us a wide range of interesting articles and reports. This month, the Roundup will highlight seven articles and one report on a range of topics, but there were many to choose from, so check out The Source –Perspectives-Articles and Reports to see what else we picked up! Narrow Networks Jonathan Gruber and Robin McKnight posted an NBER Working Paper, Controlling Health Care Costs Through Limited Network Insurance Plans: Evidence from Massachusetts State Employees, which examines the growing trend …
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