This paper examines the impact of reducing the administrative fragmentation of billing and payment, one commonly cited cause of inefficiency in US health care. We study a Medicare reform that consolidated billing processes across service types, using its staggered rollout and hospitals' prior...

This paper compares health care systems. It looks beyond normal academic, political, or journalistic rhetoric, by exactly sticking to facts, i.e. empirical data (in particular data provided by the WHO) and comprehensive case study analyses. The paper finds that a number of myths and common...

The United States has state of the art technology and world renowned expertise in medical treatment, yet in terms of healthcare it shows a dramatically poor performance in relation to the other industrialized countries. This situation is surprising, since one would expect that a free market...

This study examines the relationship between pharmaceutical R&D and health care expenditures, distinguishing between the short- and long-run impacts. To measure these relationships quantitatively, we focus on patents as a key factor driving the costs of pharmaceuticals, and develop a structured...

Growth in the number of days between an appointment request and the actual appointment reduces demand. Although such waiting times are relatively low in the US, current policy initiatives could cause them to increase. We estimate multiple-equation models of physician utilization and insurance...

A booster of the COVID-19 vaccine targeting the prevailing Omicron variant did not become available in the United States until a year after the variant was first detected. This pattern of developing, testing, and distributing a variant-specific booster may become the default response to further...

This paper studies the misallocation of Medicaid funds, its consequences for reimbursement rates, the quantity, and the quality of care provided. Combining two decades of administrative, audit, and survey data on U.S. nursing homes, we show that states employ creative financing schemes to divert...

Governments and firms often employ soft spending limits to restrict overspending while still allowing exceptions on a case-by-case basis. This paper studies a Medicare policy which capped per-patient physical therapy spending, with exceptions for patients with documented medical need. The cap...

Based on a new concept called “Turning Period”, the goal of this report is to show how we can conduct the prediction for the outlook in the different stages for the battle with outbreak of COVID-19 currently in US, in particular, to identify when each of top 15 states in USA (basically on...

This study examines the relationship between healthcare expenditure and disposable income in the 50 US states over the period 1966-2009 using fractional integration and cointegration techniques. The degree of integration and non-linearity of both series are found to vary considerably across...