Healthcare Spending and Utilization in Public and Private Medicare / Vilsa Curto, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Jonathan D. Levin, Jay Bhattacharya.

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Curto, Vilsa

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TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w23090.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: We compare healthcare spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending is 25 percent lower for MA enrollees than for enrollees in traditional Medicare (TM) in the same county with the same risk score. Spending differences between MA and TM are similar across sub-populations of enrollees and sub-categories of care, with similar reductions for "high value" and "low value" care. Spending differences primarily reflect differences in healthcare utilization; spending per encounter and hospital payments per admission are very similar in MA and TM. Geographic variation in MA spending is about 20 percent higher than in TM, but geographic variation in hospital prices is about 20 percent lower. We present evidence consistent with MA plans encouraging substitution to less expensive care, such as primary rather than specialist care, and outpatient rather than inpatient surgery, and with employing various types of utilization management. Some of the overall spending differences between MA and TM may be driven by selection on unobservables, and we report a range of estimates of this selection effect using mortality outcomes to proxy for selection.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w23090 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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January 2017.

We compare healthcare spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending is 25 percent lower for MA enrollees than for enrollees in traditional Medicare (TM) in the same county with the same risk score. Spending differences between MA and TM are similar across sub-populations of enrollees and sub-categories of care, with similar reductions for "high value" and "low value" care. Spending differences primarily reflect differences in healthcare utilization; spending per encounter and hospital payments per admission are very similar in MA and TM. Geographic variation in MA spending is about 20 percent higher than in TM, but geographic variation in hospital prices is about 20 percent lower. We present evidence consistent with MA plans encouraging substitution to less expensive care, such as primary rather than specialist care, and outpatient rather than inpatient surgery, and with employing various types of utilization management. Some of the overall spending differences between MA and TM may be driven by selection on unobservables, and we report a range of estimates of this selection effect using mortality outcomes to proxy for selection.