The Impact Of Telemedicine On Medicare Utilization, Spending, And Quality, 2019-22.

Telemedicine use remains substantially higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, although it has fallen from pandemic highs. To inform the ongoing debate about whether to continue payment for telemedicine visits, we estimated the association of greater telemedicine use across health systems with utilization, spending, and quality. In 2020, Medicare patients receiving care at health systems in the highest quartile of telemedicine use had 2.

Eviction and Poverty in American Cities.

More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year.

Coverage Denials: Government And Private Insurer Policies For Medical Necessity In Medicare.

Little is publicly known about coverage denials for medical services that do not meet medical necessity criteria. We characterized the extent of these denials and their key features, using Medicare Advantage claims for a large insurer from the period 2014-19. In this setting, claims could be denied because of traditional Medicare's coverage rules or additional Medicare Advantage private insurer rules.

The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor.

The urban poor in developing countries face challenging living environments, which may interfere with good sleep. Using actigraphy to measure sleep objectively, we find that low-income adults in Chennai, India, sleep only 5.5 hours a night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed.

IDENTIFYING SOURCES OF INEFFICIENCY IN HEALTHCARE.

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted, and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. An alternative interpretation is that hospitals with greater expertise in a treatment use it more because of their comparative advantage, suggesting that standardization is misguided.

Identifying Work Capacity and Promoting Work: A Strategy for Modernizing the SSDI Program.

The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, which provides income support to individuals who become unable to work because of a disability, has not been substantially reformed since the 1980s, despite sweeping changes in health, medical technology, and the functional requirements of jobs. I review how the SSDI program works, its history in terms of caseloads and reforms, and findings from the research evidence that offer lessons for the future. I then propose two interlocking reforms that would modernize the core functions of the program.

Market Concentration and Potential Competition in Medicare Advantage.

Issue: Medicare Advantage (MA), the private option to traditional Medicare, now serves roughly 37 percent of beneficiaries. Congress intended MA plans to achieve efficiencies in the provision of health care that lead to savings for Medicare through managed competition among private health plans.

Goal: Two elements are needed for savings to accrue: a sound payment policy and effective competition among the private plans.

Unhappy Cities.

There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across US metropolitan areas, and residents of declining cities appear less happy than others. Yet some people continue to move to these areas, and newer residents appear to be as unhappy as longer-term residents. While historical data on happiness are limited, the available facts suggest that cities that are now declining were also unhappy in their more prosperous past.

Vaccination Rates are Associated With Functional Proximity But Not Base Proximity of Vaccination Clinics.

Background: Routine annual influenza vaccinations are recommended for persons 6 months of age and older, but less than half of US adults get vaccinated. Many employers offer employees free influenza vaccinations at workplace clinics, but even then take-up is low.

Objective: To determine whether employees are significantly more likely to get vaccinated if they have a higher probability of walking by the clinic for reasons other than vaccination.

Long-term effects of the Moving to Opportunity residential mobility experiment on crime and delinquency.

Objectives: Using data from a randomized experiment, to examine whether moving youth out of areas of concentrated poverty, where a disproportionate amount of crime occurs, prevents involvement in crime.

Methods: We draw on new administrative data from the U.S.

How does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings? Evidence from Project Star.

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings.

Evidence on early-life income and late-life health from America's Dust Bowl era.

In recent decades, elderly Americans have enjoyed enormous gains in longevity and reductions in disability. The causes of this progress remain unclear, however. This paper investigates the role of fetal programming, exploring how economic progress early in the 20th century might be related to declining disability today.

The role of public health improvements in health advances: the twentieth-century United States.

Mortality rates in the United States fell more rapidly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in any other period in American history. This decline coincided with an epidemiological transition and the disappearance of a mortality "penalty" associated with living in urban areas. There is little empirical evidence and much unresolved debate about what caused these improvements, however.

The interaction of partial public insurance programs and residual private insurance markets: evidence from the US Medicare program.

A ubiquitous form of government intervention in insurance markets is to provide compulsory, but partial, public insurance coverage and to allow voluntary purchases of supplementary private insurance. This paper investigates the effects of such programs on insurance coverage for the risks not covered by the public program, using the example of the US Medicare program. I find that Medicare does not have substantial effects-in either direction-on coverage in residual private insurance markets.