Quality reports about health plans and providers are becoming more prevalent in health care markets. This paper casts the decision about what information to report to consumers about health plans as a policy decision. In a market with adverse selection, complete information about quality leads to inefficient outcomes. In a Rothschild-Stiglitz model, we show that averaging quality information in...

The authors of this brief interviewed stakeholders in states with high-ranking and low-ranking health system performance, according to The Commonwealth Fund's State Scorecard on Health System Performance. Findings suggest there are market, political, and cultural characteristics that can help or hinder health system improvement. High-performing states are more likely to have: (1) a history of c...

One effect of the Affordable Care Act's "Cadillac tax" (now delayed until 2020) is to undo part of the existing federal tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance. The specific features of this tax on high-cost health plans--notably, the inclusion of tax-favored savings vehicles such as health savings accounts (HSAs) in the formula for determining who is subject to the tax--are designed pr...

Pharmaceutical industry sectors are at odds as the Food and Drug Administration seeks to define "interchangeability" for biosimilars. The battle lines vary by topic, but biosimilar marketers, health plans, and drugstores are generally urging lower hurdles.

This article investigates estimators of a weighted average of stratum-specific univariate parameters and compares them in terms of a design-based estimate of mean-squared error (MSE). The research is motivated by a stratified survey sample of Florida Medicaid beneficiaries, in which the parameters are population stratum means and the weights are known and determined by the population sampling f...

In this article, physician participation in alternative health plans is examined, using cross-sectional data from the Physicians' Practice Costs and Income Survey, 1983-85. Overall, about one-third of physicians participated in one or more plans, ranging from 18 percent of general practitioners to 46 percent of medical subspecialists. Only 19 percent, however, received income from prepaid sourc...

Implementing a comprehensive approach to decreasing tobacco use in a large health plan requires hard work and commitment on the part of many individuals. We found that major organisational change can be accomplished and sustained. Keys to our success included our decision to remove access barriers to our cessation programmes (including cost); obtaining top leadership buy-in; identifying account...