Thursday, December 17, 2015
What's Driving Variation in New York's Hospital Spending and Prices? (NY State Health Foundation)
A new study covered in yesterday's New York Times looks at how hospital spending and prices vary across the country. This is a careful study done by some of the most respected academic economists in the country. It adjusts for many factors that could legitimately affect the cost (or price) of, for example, a specific procedure at different hospitals.
To date, analysis of spending variation has been very difficult to do because hospitals and insurers tend to hide this information from consumers (and researchers) because it is considered "commercially sensitive." But, these researchers had access to a large data set of claims from private insurers across the country.
There is lots of information that flows from the study, but I find four items are most important to those of us interested in the New York health care system. . .