Recent policy discussions by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) regarding physician prices in the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare Program reflect movement toward a market pricing model. Earlier objectives such as sustainable levels of spending have given way to concerns over the relationship between fees and actual costs, access to care, and the importance of demand an...

Since its inception, the Medicare Program has allowed for the participation of private health plans, but the relationship of private plans to the government-sponsored fee-for-service (FFS) plan has been the subject of debate. Increased payments to private plans, the introduction of regional preferred provider organizations (PPOs), and a mandated demonstration of price competition that includes ...

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The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has proposed incorporating hospital capital payments into the Medicare prospective payment system. HCFA's proposal includes an adjustment to capital payments for geographic differences in capital costs, derived from the prospective payment system area hospital wage index. Alternatively, the geographic adjustment could be based on an area construct...

Effective in 2000, Medicare's Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) sets pre-determined reimbursement rates for hospital outpatient services, replacing the prior cost-based methods of reimbursement. Using Florida outpatient discharge data, we study the effect of OPPS on hospital outpatient volume. We find that on average Medicare rate cuts either decreased or had no significant effect on...

Many security protocols rely on authentication of communicating entities and encryption of exchanged data. Traditionally, authentication and encryption have been separate processes, however there are combined solutions, referred to as authenticated-encryption (AE). The payment card industry is revising its protocol specifications and considering AE, however there has been uncertainty around per...

To determine the factors associated with primary care physician self-selection into different payment models, we used a panel of eight waves of administrative data for all primary care physicians who practiced in Ontario between 2003/2004 and 2010/2011. We used a mixed effects logistic regression model to estimate physicians' choice of three alternative payment models: fee for service, enhanced...

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) has identified two important problems with the Medicare+Choice (M+C) program: nationwide geographic inequity in government-financed benefits, and unequal government payments for M+C plans versus fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare in the same market area. MedPAC concludes that both problems cannot be solved simultaneously. We argue that both problems...

Bidding has been proposed to replace or complement the administered prices that Medicare pays to hospitals and health plans. In 2006, the Medicare Advantage program implemented a competitive bidding system to determine plan payments. In perfectly competitive models, plans bid their costs and thus bids are insensitive to the benchmark. Under many other models of competition, bids respond to chan...

This study estimates the effect of Medicare Advantage (MA) payments and State Medicaid policies on the choice by Medicaid eligible Medicare beneficiaries to either join a MA plan, remain in the fee-for-service (FFS) and enroll in Medicaid (dually enrolled), or remain in FFS Medicare without joining Medicaid. Individual plan choice was modeled using a multinomial logit. The sample includes Medic...