Recent Research from University of California Irvine Highlight Findings in Healthcare Economics (Understanding the Distributional Impacts of Health Insurance Reform: Evidence From a Consumer Cost-sharing Program): Economics – Healthcare Economics

2021 SEP 21 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Researchers detail new data in Economics - Healthcare Economics. According to news reporting originating in Irvine, California, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “We examine the heterogeneous effects of reference pricing, a health insurance reform introduced by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), on the distribution of spending by patients and insurers. Using medical claims data for CalPERS and a comparison group not subject to reference pricing, we use the changes-in-changes approach to estimate the quantile treatment effects of the program across different medical procedures.”

Funders for this research include NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, NIH National Institute on Aging (NIA).

The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from the University of California Irvine, “We find that the quantile treatment effects vary across the patient spending distributions, with a range of positive and negative estimates of the QTE, depending on the medical procedure considered. However, across all procedures, the insurer’s spending distributions tend to shift left, with the largest reductions occurring in the right-tail of the spending distributions.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “These effects are not captured by mean estimates but have important policy implications.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Understanding the Distributional Impacts of Health Insurance Reform: Evidence From a Consumer Cost-sharing Program. Health Economics, 2021. Health Economics can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA. (Wiley-Blackwell - http://www.wiley.com/; Health Economics - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1099-1050)

Our news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Marion Aouad, University of California Irvine, Dept. of Economics, 3151 Social Sci Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697, United States. Additional authors for this research include Timothy T. Brown and Christopher M. Whaley.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4410. 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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