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Slowing medical CPI may not last

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Medical CPI is only 3.2%.  This is less than the 4.1% average inflation rate over the past ten years and the 6.0% average medical inflation rate over the...

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Uwe Reinhardt on Hospital Prices

Health Economist Uwe Reinhardt supports expanding the DRG system to all payers.   “Under Medicare’s approach, hospitals are paid one price for an entire inpatient episode, rather than piece-rate...

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What does drug ‘price’ mean anyway?

How much do drugs cost?  The answer to this question depends who you are and how you want to measure cost.  For instance, MediSpan‘s Master Drug Data Base (MDDB) defines drugs prices as follows:...

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Are Health Care Prices Becoming More Transparent?

Health economists have always said that one of the main problems with health care is that no one knows the price of any services.  Thus, individuals have less of an incentive to shop for high value...

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The Effect of Hospital Consolidation on Prices and Quality

An interesting report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation summarizes the literature describing the effect of hospital concentration in a market on prices and quality.  The general consensus from...

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End the Gag Rule

As Time Magazine reports, health care prices are fucked up.  Castlight is one company that is trying to shed some light on health care prices to improve transparency.  Their CEO, Giovanni Colella,...

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Does comparison shopping work in health care?

According to a recent study in JAMA, the answer may be no.  High-deductible health plans aim to not only reduce the use of unnecessary services, but to make consumers more price sensitive and search...

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Static and Dynamic Effects of Vaccine Policy on R&D

How does health policy and pricing affect investment in innovation? This is the research question investigated in Amy Finkelstein’s 2004 QJE paper on Static and Dynamic Effects of Health Policy. She...

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How much money do drug companies get for their drugs?

Let’s say a you fill a 30-day prescription and the list price of the drug is $100.  Let’s say that you pay a $10 copay and your insurer pays $90.  What share of this $100, does the drug company...

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Why are hospital prices crazy?

Sarah Kliff of Vox has an interesting article looking at hospital pricing.  She provides examples of $629 for a Band-Aid in an emergency department to over $3,000 to look at a bruised finger. Part of...

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Do hospital purchases of physician practices increase or decrease prices?

The effect of health care industry consolidation on prices is a question argued about by many including researchers, economists, anti-trust, lawyers, regulators and more.  There is evidence that health...

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Competition matters

While the high price of branded drugs often gets a lot of attention in the public, few realize that after patent expiration, prices often plunge dramatically and high quality treatments are available...

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Trump Executive Order to Mandate Price Transparency for Providers

As the N.Y. Times reports, more transparency is coming to provider prices. The White House released an executive order Monday afternoon intended to require insurance companies, doctors and hospitals...

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Branded pharmaceutical prices rise, but rebates making up a larger share of...

A paper by Hernandez et al. (2020) in JAMA examines trends in branded drug prices using data from SSR Health between 2007 and 2018. The authors find the following: From 2007 to 2018, list prices...

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Are prices for diabetes drugs rising or falling?

Conventional wisdom would hold that the prices are rising…aren’t they? To correctly answer this question, one must define which prices you are talking about. Are we looking at the list price that is...

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Few Americans research hospital prices

New regulation is making hospital prices available to patients. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reports: As of January 1 of this year, hospitals are required to post prices of common health...

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Who pays more for hospital and physician services: commercial payers,...

Many people might know that generally the answer is commercial health plans have the most generous reimbursement compared to government plans. However, a key question is how much more do they pay?...

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Are health care prices falling?

It seems like everything just gets more and more expensive.  But are prices for medical care declining?  Cutler et al. (1998) found in seminal paper “Are medical prices declining? Evidence for heart...

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