Measuring private equity penetration and consolidation in emergency medicine and anesthesiology.

Private equity-backed staffing companies in anesthesia and emergency medicine, as well as those owned by publicly traded companies, gained notoriety for driving surprise billing-a practice where patients unexpectedly treated by an out-of-network provider can be billed for the difference between the provider's charge and what their insurer pays. Yet, little is known about the evolution of private equity and publicly traded company investment in these specialties. In this study, we construct a novel dataset identifying the ownership structure of anesthesia and emergency medicine physician groups to document trends in consolidation and the growing role of private equity and publicly traded companies.

Substantial Growth In Medicare Advantage And Implications For Reform.

Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment increased by 22.2 million beneficiaries (337.0 percent) from 2006 through 2022, whereas traditional Medicare enrollment declined by 1.

Do Medicare's Facility Fees Incentivize Hospitals to Vertically Integrate with Oncologists?

Within the past decade, the U.S. health care market has undergone massive vertical integration, prompting economists to study the underlying causes and consequences of hospital-physician integration.

Assessing the Quality of SK&A's Office-Based Physician Database for Identifying Oncologists.

Health services research increasingly uses commercial databases that capture provider practice characteristics. Little is known about how these data sets compare along other dimensions with publicly available data. We assess the quality of one of the most commonly used commercial databases, SK&A's office-based physician database, for capturing oncologists who bill the Medicare fee-for-service program.

The Changing Health Insurance Coverage Landscape in the United States.

Changes in the health insurance coverage landscape in the United States during the past decade have important implications for receipt and affordability of cancer care. In this paper, we summarize evidence for the association between health insurance coverage and cancer prevention and treatment. We then discuss ongoing changes in health care coverage, including implementation of provisions of the Affordable Care Act, increasing prevalence of high-deductible health insurance plans, and factors that affect health care delivery, with a focus on vertical integration of hospitals and providers.

Progress in pediatric asthma surveillance II: geospatial patterns of asthma in Alameda County, California.

Introduction: As with many diseases, the epidemic of asthma among children over the past few decades has been shaped by a social and environmental context that is becoming progressively more evident. Commonly used methods for asthma surveillance, however, are based on national rather than local data. The purpose of this study was to develop high-resolution asthma surveillance techniques responsive to the needs of health care professionals and local child health and social justice advocates.