Study Findings from American Dental Association Provide New Insights into Health and Society (Pricing In Commercial Dental Insurance and Provider Markets)

2020 SEP 21 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Investigators publish new report on Health and Medicine - Health and Society. According to news reporting out of Chicago, Illinois, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “To examine the impact of commercial dental insurer and provider concentration on dentist reimbursement. We utilized provider data from the American Dental Association, reimbursement data from IBM Watson MarketScan®Commercial Research Databases, submitted billed charges from FAIR Health®, dental insurance market concentration data from FAIR Health®, and county-level demographic and economic data from the Area Health Resources File and the Council for Community and Economic Research.”

Funders for this research include Health Policy Institute, American Dental Association.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from American Dental Association, “We used the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to separately measure commercial dental insurance concentration and dentist concentration. We studied the effect of provider and insurance concentration on dentist reimbursement. Using two-stage least squares, we accounted for potential endogeneity in dental insurer and provider concentration. Across the dental procedures we examined, a 10 percent increase in dental insurance concentration is associated with a 1.95 percent (P-value = .033) reduction in gross payments to dentists. Conversely, a 10 percent increase in dentist concentration is associated with a more modest 0.71 percent (P-value = .024) increase in gross payments. A 10 percent increase in dental insurance concentration is associated with a 1.16 percentage point (P-value = .016) decline in the allowed-to-list price ratio, while a 10 percent increase in dentist concentration is associated with a 0.56 percentage point (P-value = .001) increase in the allowed-to-list price ratio. Similar patterns were found across dental procedure subcategories.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Dental provider markets are substantially less concentrated than insurance markets, which may limit the ability of dentists to garner higher reimbursement.”

For more information on this research see: Pricing In Commercial Dental Insurance and Provider Markets. Health Services Research, 2020;():. Health Services Research can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA. (Wiley-Blackwell - http://www.wiley.com/; Health Services Research - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1475-6773)

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Kamyar Nasseh, American Dental Association, Health Policy Institute, 211 East Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60611, United States. Additional authors for this research include Marko Vujicic and John R. Bowblis.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6773.13544. 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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