Public spending must improve health, not just healthcare

On Management Matters: Why We Must Improve Public Health Management Through Action; Comment on “Management Matters: A Leverage Point for Health Systems Strengthening in Global Health”

Public health management is a pillar of public health practice. Only through effective management can research, theory, and scientific innovation be translated into successful public health action. With this in mind, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed an innovative program called Improving Public Health Management for Action (IMPACT) which aims to address th...

Healthcare Spending and Utilization in Public and Private Medicare∗

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...

Initiatives to Improve the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Public Spending:

Does More Public Health Spending Buy Better Health?

BACKGROUND In this article, we attempt to address a persistent question in the health policy literature: Does more public health spending buy better health? This is a difficult question to answer due to unobserved differences in public health across regions as well as the potential for an endogenous relationship between public health spending and public health outcomes. METHODS We take advant...

Health Services Research Spending and Healthcare System Impact; Comment on “Public Spending on Health Service and Policy Research in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Modest Proposal”

The challenges associated with translating health services and policy research (HSPR) evidence into practice are many and long-standing. Indeed, those challenges have themselves spawned new areas of research, including knowledge translation and implementation science. These sub-disciplines have increased our understanding of the critical success factors associated with the uptake of research ev...