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Tag Archives: healthcare costs

What Happens When a Safety Net Hospital Closes?

Much of this article I rewrote to make it clearer for the reader. It is written by upper management. I do disagree with the conclusions. Throwing more money at healthcare is not going to solve the issues he discusses. The article praises Commercial Healthcare Insurance who pay more for patient care and whose costs are twice Medicare of which much is administrative cost. The issue is not Medicare or Medicare. The issue is the cost of the...

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Changes in Healthcare Costs

I had a post the other day trying to make sense of changes in healthcare costs. Based on some of the comments to that post, a bit more thought, some data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the CPI-All Urban Consumers, I think my point distills down to this graph: (click to embiggen) The graph shows the annual YoY change in real healthcare costs defined three three ways. The green line shows the annual change in total healthcare...

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Healthcare Costs – I Got Confused by Some Graphs

I don’t follow healthcare as much as others at this blog. I started playing around with some graphs at FRED and got a bit confused. I don’t mind being confused, but I like to clear up that confusion eventually. So perhaps someone can tell me what’s going on. First, this graph of healthcare expenditures / GDP which seems to indicate that Obamacare bent the cost curve: (click to embiggenize) But looking at the annual change in healthcare expenditures /...

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Healthcare Costs, Externalities, and Changing Social Norms

One of the topics I’ve railed about many times during the decade and change in which I’ve been blogging is that society would be much better off if we forced people to pay the cost of negative externalities they impose on other people through their behavior. An obvious example would be making polluters pay for the cost that the pollution they emit inflicts on everyone else. But it turns out there are a lot of these behavioral externalities in healthcare. For...

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