Data on Insurance Reported by Researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance (Demand and Supply Drivers of Medicare and Non-medicare Health Spending: an Analysis of Us States, 1991-2019): Insurance

2024 AUG 23 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Investigators publish new report on Insurance. According to news originating from Cambridge, Massachusetts, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “For the last four decades, policymakers have attempted to control the United States’s high health care costs by reducing patients’ demand for care (e.g., by imposing managed-care restrictions or high costs on patients at the time of use). Yet studies based mostly on data from the public Medicare program, which covers mostly elderly Americans, suggest that supply (e.g., number of physicians or hospital beds) rather than demand drives aggregate service use and, hence, costs.”

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Cambridge Health Alliance, “Using variation between U.S. states in per enrollee Medicare spending versus per capita spending of all other (non-Medicare) individuals, we find that greater supply boosts costs for the entire population. Furthermore, we find that factors that suppress demand in the non-Medicare population do reduce non-Medicare health care spending, but simultaneously increase Medicare spending. This suggests that for a given supply of medical resources, suppressing demand for one group of patients may produce a compensatory increase in provision of care to those whose demand has not been suppressed.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Health planning to assure adequate medical resources where they are needed while preventing excess supply where it is duplicative and wasteful is likely a more effective cost control strategy than the imposition of managed-care restrictions or imposing higher costs onto patients seeking care.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Demand and Supply Drivers of Medicare and Non-medicare Health Spending: an Analysis of Us States, 1991-2019. International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, 2024. International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services can be contacted at: Sage Publications Ltd, 1 Olivers Yard, 55 City Road, London EC1Y 1SP, England.

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from Adam Gaffney, Cambridge Health Alliance, Dept. of Medicine, Cambridge, MA, United States. Additional authors for this research include Danny McCormick, Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein and Gracie Himmelstein.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1177/27551938241258399. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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