Healthcare Economist Unbiased Analysis of Today’s Healthcare Issues
- 2025 Measles Outbreakby Jason Shafrin on June 18, 2025 at 4:43 am
Here are statistics from the CDC about the 1,197 individuals (as of 13 June 2025) that have been infected with measles during the 2025 outbreak: 793 were children (347 (29%) aged <5; 446 (37%) aged 5-19) 5% were previously vaccinated (2% with 1 MMR dose; 3% with 2 MMR doses) 144 (12%) were hospitalized 3…
- Do pay-for-performance programs actually improve quality of care?by Jason Shafrin on June 17, 2025 at 1:28 am
This is one of the fundamental questions in health policy in recent years. Quality can be measured in two parts. First, does quality improved for targeted patients? Second, does quality improve for non-targeted patients. The first question is relatively clear. One would think that quality would improve for the patients targeted by a pay-for-performance (P4P)…
- Which states have the most private-equity owned hospitals?by Jason Shafrin on June 13, 2025 at 12:06 am
Data from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) provides the answer. Data below are sorted by most to least number (N) private equity-owned hospitals. One can clearly see that Texas is leading the way in terms of raw numbers but New Mexico has the highest share of hospitals that are PE-owned. You can find more…
- States starting to limit payer use of prior authorization?by Jason Shafrin on June 12, 2025 at 4:49 am
Recently, I published a paper noting that the risk of using prior authorization and step edits may vary by the disease to which this type of utilization management is applied. States are starting to pass legislation to limit how health insurers can use prior authorization rules. According to the American Medical Association (AMA), 10 states…
- How should nurse practitioners and physician assistants bill for their services?by Jason Shafrin on June 11, 2025 at 4:46 am
That is the topic of a Health Affairs Forefront article by Neprash, Perkins and Mehrotra (2025). This is an important question as approximately one in four visits are now provided by nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) across the Medicare program. NPs and PAs can either bill payers one of two ways: They can…