Tag Archives: Medicare

Bargaining in the Shadow of a Giant: Medicare’s Influence on Private Payment Systems

From Jeff Clemens and Joshua Gottlieb: We analyze Medicare’s influence on private payments for physicians’ services. Using a large administrative change in payments for surgical procedures relative to other medical services, we find that private payments follow Medicare’s lead. On average, a … Continue reading

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The Response of Drug Expenditure to Contract Design in Medicare Part D

From Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Paul Schrimpf, We study the demand response to non-linear price schedules using data on insurance contacts and prescription drug claims in Medicare Part D. Consistent with static response of drug use to price, we document … Continue reading

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Short post: Good News, Bad News

Good News: Obama taps Brian Deese for Deputy Budget Director Bad News: HHS scraps proposed cuts to private Medicare plans

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Regional Variation in Health Insurance Premia, Wages, & Health Costs

While I’m certainly not the first to point these features out, it is astounding to look at how quickly health insurance premia have grown overtime, especially when you compare this growth to that of average wages, total Medicare spending per … Continue reading

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The Effect of U.S. Health Insurance Expansions on Medical Innovation

Here’s an interesting recent paper by Jeff Clemens on the effect of health insurance expansions on medical innovation. Abstract: I study the effect of health insurance expansions on medical innovation. Innovation by practitioners creates important roles for local patient flows and payment … Continue reading

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The Medicare Eligibility Age: Demographics and Medical Care Spending

In contrast to Social Security Reform, we do not find a large effect of potential increases in the age of eligibility on the long-term ability to finance medical spending. This is partly because the oldest old spend much more on … Continue reading

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The Medicare Eligibility Age: Impacts on Health Behavior and Outcomes

Since many people are talking about raising the medicare eligibility age (e.g. Maya MacGuineas vs. Aaron E. Carroll, Matt Yglesias, Jared Bernstein, etc), I thought I’d highlight an AER paper by David Card, Carlos Dobkin, and Nicole Maestas that uses Medicare eligibility rules (i.e. … Continue reading

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The Growing Burden of Payroll Taxes

Here’s a column on reforming the payroll tax that I wrote in NYTimes Economix today: Payroll taxes and corporate income taxes accounted for an equal share of federal tax revenue in 1969. By 2009, payroll taxes generated more than six times as much … Continue reading

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