December 2021 | Hospitals, Workforce, Equity & More

A Missouri cardio-obstetrics program and a national registry target the leading cause of maternal death.

We analyzed Wisconsin court records from the period 2001–18 to document trends in hospital lawsuits to recover patients’ unpaid medical bills. These lawsuits increased 37 percent during this period, from 1.12 per 1,000 residents in 2001 to 1.53 per 1,000 ...

States can challenge proposed hospital mergers by using antitrust laws to prevent anticompetitive harms. This observational study examined additional state laws—principally charitable trust, nonprofit corporation, health and safety, and certificate-of-...

Critical access hospitals are important providers of care for rural and other underserved communities, but they face staffing and quality challenges while operating with low margins. Medicaid expansion has been found to improve hospital finances broadly ...

Differences in income between male and female academic physicians are well known, but differences for community physicians and career differences in income have not been quantified. We used earnings data from 80,342 full-time US physicians to estimate ...

Physician practices are increasingly being acquired by hospitals and health systems. Despite evidence that this type of vertical integration is profitable for hospitals, the association between these acquisitions and the incomes of physicians in the ...

There is strong preference among people with disabling conditions to receive care at home rather than in an institutional setting. Differences in state policies may make this more feasible in some states than others. Yet no study to date has examined ...

In this study we explored sociodemographic disparities in COVID-19 vaccine access upon initial rollout at Publix grocery store locations throughout Florida in January 2021. Florida officials reported that they chose Publix stores for the vaccine rollout ...

Many promising advances in precision health and other Big Data research rely on large data sets to analyze correlations among genetic variants, behavior, environment, and outcomes to improve population health. But these data sets are generally populated ...

National estimates suggest that kidney failure incidence is declining in the US. However, whether this trend is evident in areas with socioeconomic disadvantage is unknown. We examined trends in kidney failure incidence by county-level poverty between ...

Claims data, which form the foundation of risk adjustment in payment for health care services, may reflect efforts to capture more—or more severe—clinical conditions rather than true changes in health status. This can distort payments. We quantify this in ...

In 2012 Medicare introduced the quality bonus program, linking financial bonuses to commercial insurers’ quality performance in Medicare Advantage (MA). Despite large investments in the program, evidence of its effectiveness is limited. We analyzed ...

Despite growing antibiotic resistance, the clinical drug development pipeline for antibiotics has been sparse largely because of an unsustainable business model. We illustrate three models to accelerate antibiotic development, using Medicare new ...

Through the Accelerated Approval Program, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) may approve drugs that treat severe or life-threatening conditions on the basis of preliminary evidence of efficacy. Many of these drugs are made available at extremely high ...

Low-income Medicare beneficiaries rely on Medicaid for supplemental coverage but must meet income and asset tests to qualify. We examined states’ income and asset tests for full-benefit Medicaid during the period 2006–18 and examined how alternative asset ...

Increasingly, mental health policies focus on “serious mental illness” (SMI). This trend is mostly unquestioned, but SMI policies have serious flaws that raise concerns about their effectiveness and desirability. One such flaw is the lack of consensus on ...

This is the second annual Kaiser Family Foundation Employer Health Benefits Survey released since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite widespread workplace disruption, the key metrics we survey remained fairly stable. Average premiums for ...

A genetic counselor uses her own resources to identify the root cause of her mother’s changing personality.