Articles
Drug Prices, Business of Health Care, Tax-exempt Status
Analysis Gets it Wrong on Health Care Spending
A recent analysis from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation, “What drives health spending in the U.S. compared to other countries,” does not provide a full picture on health care spending in the U.S. while also downplaying the immense role that drug costs play in overall health care spending.
Price Transparency, Cost Management
Blog: RAND Gets it Wrong (Again) on Hospital Prices
The RAND Corporation has released the third edition of its hospital price transparency study. The AHA previously highlighted our extensive concerns with the data and methodology used in the last version.
Medicare, Finance & Budgeting, Cost Management
Hospital price growth remains in check, cherry-picked claims do not
An all-too-common activity among some researchers is cherry picking data to support pre-conceived arguments. One of these false narratives is that hospitals and health systems are uniquely responsible for increased health care prices. But an examination of comprehensive data tell a different story.
Mergers & Acquisitions
The echo chamber propagates the same old same old for hospital mergers: we can do better.
By Melinda Hatton, Aaron Wesolowski - AHA Vice President of Policy, Research, Analytics and Strategy, Benjamin Finder
Hospital mergers are worth discussing, but too often the criticism is far from rigorous and is more like an echo chamber where critics cite those with whom they agree and ignore inconvenient facts that show how the hospital field continues provide quality care in their communities.
Mergers & Acquisitions, Quality Measures
Another flawed article on hospital consolidation gets undeserved attention
By Melinda Hatton, Aaron Wesolowski - AHA Vice President of Policy, Research, Analytics and Strategy, Benjamin Finder
Chief among the flaws in the most recent study on hospital consolidation published in the New England Journal of Medicine was that its conclusions were informed by preconceived notions of what the authors thought the data should show, which was then undermined further by the arbitrary choices made in comparing hospitals. Unfortunately, the media, once again, failed to closely examine the conclusions, in many instances exaggerating or misrepresenting the findings to manufacture attention-grabbing headlines.
Advocacy & Public Policy
AHA reaction to RAND study
Last week, researchers at RAND released a study that made broad claims about the prices that private insurers pay hospitals. The RAND authors relied on severely limited data and questionable assumptions to draw far-reaching conclusions about the way hospitals are paid for patient care.