Former HCFO Grantees Presented at Yale’s Solomon Center Inaugural Conference

The National Academy for Social Insurance co-sponsored a conference to mark the launch of the new Solomon Center for Health Policy and Law at Yale Law School. The Solomon Center will focus on the governance, business, and practice of health care in the United States. The conference [1] brought together experts and practitioners from the health care industry, government, and academia to discuss integration, consolidation, and competition in the wake of the Affordable Care Act. Former HCFO grantees Robert Berenson and Michael Chernew spoke on a panel about accountable care organizations and their impact on physicians. In his HCFO-funded study [2], Berenson explored hospital pricing under Medicare Advantage (MA) and traditional Medicare and found [3] that MA plans pay at or slightly more than 100 percent of traditional Medicare payment for hospital services. In his HCFO-funded study [4], Chernew investigated factors related to variation in cost growth in Medicare and commercial sectors, including geographic correlation [5], fiscal sustainability [6], and percentage of primary care doctors [7].