Publications

Smoking during pregnancy can have significant adverse health effects for babies, yet many women smoke during pregnancy. This paper examines whether state tobacco control policies lead to improved birth outcomes and to what extent the success of these policies depends on accumulated maternal human capital.

This study assesses whether Medicaid coverage of smoking cessation services reduces maternal smoking and improves birth outcomes. Findings suggest Medicaid coverage of smoking cessation only affected women enrolled prior to pregnancy.

High rates of hospital readmissions are widely recognized as a significant problem among Medicare beneficiaries.  These re-hospitalizations not only drive up health care costs, but may reflect low quality of care, poor coordination among providers, and a lack of understanding among patients about how to manage their own conditions.

Millions of uninsured Americans rely on hospital emergency departments for medical care.  These patients receive hospital bills based on inflated “billed charges” that bear little relationship to the actual market prices paid by insured patients.

Value-based insurance design (VBID) is an approach that attempts to improve the quality of care by selectively encouraging or discouraging the use of specific health care services. This study is a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature to evaluate the evidence of the effects of VBID policies on medication adherence and medical expenditures.

Historically, low Medicaid reimbursement rates have limited the willingness of health care providers to accept Medicaid patients, leading to access problems in many communities. In this study, the researchers examined the effect of payment rates on access to dental care among children on Medicaid and on dentists’ participation in the program.

Federal insurance reform is modeled substantially on the successful reforms in Massachusetts, including its version of a health insurance exchange, the Connector. This study investigates employers’ use of the Connector in order to inform states and the federal government about best strategies for design and operation.

Millions of uninsured Americans rely on hospital emergency departments for medical care. Throughout the United States, uninsured patients treated in or admitted to the hospital through the ED receive hospital bills based on what hospitals call “billed charges.”

The Medicare program has implemented pay-for-performance (P4P), or Value-Based Purchasing, for inpatient care and for Medicare Advantage plans, and plans to implement a program for physicians in 2015. Drawing on HCFO- and other funded work, this article reviews evidence on the effectiveness of P4P and identifies design criteria deemed to be best practice in P4P. The researchers then assess the extent to which Medicare's existing and planned Value-Based Purchasing programs align with these best practices.

Control for area differences in population health is necessary to measure geographic variations in medical spending.  We study casemix adjustment methodological issues and evaluate alternative approaches using claims from 1.6 million Medicare beneficiaries in 60 representative communities.