Geographic Variation
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Understanding how price growth affected areas differently across the country
Read more: Understanding how price growth affected areas differently across the countryRecently, the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) published its Healthy Marketplace Index (HMI) – Price Index report, examining relative health care prices in 112 different metropolitan areas. This report is the first in a new series of releases from the HMI project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which compares commercial health care markets…
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2016 Health Care Cost and Utilization Report
Tags: Drug Spending, Geographic Variation, HCCUR, Inpatient Spending, Out-of-Pocket, Outpatient Spending, Physician Spending, Prices, Utilization
Read more: 2016 Health Care Cost and Utilization ReportThe 2016 Health Care Cost and Utilization Report shows that spending per privately insured person grew by 4.6 percent, faster than in previous years. Price increases were the primary driver. The report covers the period 2012 through 2016 and includes claims data from four national insurance companies: Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, and UnitedHealthcare. The data in…
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ER spending among the commercially insured continued to rise in 2016, driven by the price and use of high severity cases (2009-2016)
Tags: Commercially Insured, Emergency Room, Geographic Variation, Outpatient Spending, Prices, Utilization
Read more: ER spending among the commercially insured continued to rise in 2016, driven by the price and use of high severity cases (2009-2016)HCCI recently expanded its reporting on emergency room (ER) spending trends to include the most recent data available (2016). We characterize trends in spending, price, and utilization for the five Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes designed to capture the level of severity and complexity of every ER visit. While average prices for all five ER…
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Workers in low income counties more likely to be long-term opioid users
Read more: Workers in low income counties more likely to be long-term opioid usersPast literature has found links between higher opioid use and local economic conditions for people enrolled in public health programs, but there has been little discussion of whether this relationship occurs among the privately insured. Using HCCI claims data and county level income data from the US Census Bureau, we examined how a county’s median…
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Health Affairs: Understanding Health Spending – Lessons From The Healthy Marketplace Index
Read more: Health Affairs: Understanding Health Spending – Lessons From The Healthy Marketplace IndexHEALTH AFFAIRS BLOG: “As policymakers consider actions to address challenges with the Affordable Care Act and ongoing growth in health spending, the importance of understanding local health care market dynamics is more important than ever. Traditionally, policy makers and other stakeholders have evaluated commercial health care markets’ total spending and often attributed high spending to…
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Price of insulin prescription doubled between 2012 and 2016
Read more: Price of insulin prescription doubled between 2012 and 2016In honor of National Diabetes Month, our inaugural blog post focuses on a topic of particular interest to people with diabetes: the price of insulin. Insulin is the hormone responsible for the body’s ability to use sugar and prevent dangerously high and potentially deadly levels of blood sugar. Diabetics are unable to make enough insulin…
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Trends in Total and Out-of-Pocket Spending in Metro Areas: 2012-2015
Read more: Trends in Total and Out-of-Pocket Spending in Metro Areas: 2012-2015This data brief examines geographic variation in health care per capita spending, with a focus on consumer per capita out-of-pocket spending across geographies (2012-2015). It also explores whether the proportion of people enrolled in consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) and the proportion not utilizing health care services had any influence on out-of-pocket spending.
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Children’s Health Spending Report 2010-2014
Read more: Children’s Health Spending Report 2010-2014Children’s Health Spending: 2010-2014 examines spending on health care for children covered by employer-sponsored insurance from 2010 to 2014. For the first time, HCCI analyzed children’s health care spending trends at the state level, reporting on Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia. Key…
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National Chartbook of Health Care Prices 2015
Read more: National Chartbook of Health Care Prices 2015The National Chartbook of Health Care Prices – 2015 and accompanying Health Affairs article “Prices For Common Medical Services Vary Substantially Among the Commercially Insured” illuminates differences in price for over 240 common medical services in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Among the commercially insured, wide variation in prices have some states paying…
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The Price-Quality Paradox in Health Care
Read more: The Price-Quality Paradox in Health CareThis data brief compares average state-level prices against quality measures for asthma, diabetes and hypertension care and finds that higher prices for medical services are not always indicative of higher quality of care.