Employer leadership in the era of workplace rationing.
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This article represents the history of primary care and behavioral health integration at Group Health Cooperative (GHC) over the last decade, and foreshadows probable futures for this work into the next decade. To build from a logical progression, the article responds to a series of questions: 1. Why integrate primary care and behavioral health? 2. What has been done so far and how well has it worked? 3. Keeping the end in mind, what's the idealized picture of integration for the future? 4. How to get from here to there? What will help or hinder the effort? and 5. Again, why make these efforts to integrate?
A key aim of the evaluation of the Fort Bragg Demonstration was to determine whether delivering services through a continuum of care lowered expenditures on mental health services. The evaluation clearly showed that expenditures were actually higher in the Demonstration. Critics of the evaluation claimed that the evaluation's perspective on costs was too narrow-in particular, that the Demonstration produced cost shifting and cost offset that were not captured by the evaluation. New data allow us to include a broader array of costs: mental health services received outside the catchment areas, general medical services for the children themselves, and mental health services used by family members. Results showed that reductions in other costs do partially offset higher expenditures on mental health services for children at the Fort Bragg Demonstration. However, even when broader costs are included, total family expenditures are still substantially higher at the Demonstration.
This paper examines whether a health care provider's choice of service intensity for any patient group affects its cost shifting behavior. Our theoretical models indicate that firms may respond to lower prospective payment by decreasing service intensity to all of its patient groups, thereby giving firms an alternative to cost shifting. Additionally, the conditions under which cost shifting and lower service intensity occur are identical, regardless of profit status. Using a panel of California hospitals, we found that nonprofit hospitals do cost shift, while profit-maximizing hospitals do not. However, both firms respond to lower prospective payment by decreasing service intensity, thus supporting our theoretical conclusion that lower service intensity can be used as an alternative to cost shifting.
We conducted a study of the change from fee-for-service to managed care for mental health services in the Massachusetts Medicaid program, which occurred in fiscal year 1993. We estimated the effect of managed care on total public expenditures over both the short and the long term. Per person expenditures were lower by 24% in the first year of managed care but only lower by 5% in the second and third years. We also tested for cost-shifting by estimating expenditures for five specific services paid by three public agencies. Expenditures on services paid by the managed care vendor decreased, expenditures paid by Medicaid increased, and expenditures paid by the Department of Mental Health decreased. We discuss the implications for both cost-shifting and quality of care improvements. The results from two-part expenditure models indicate that some cost-shifting may be related to quality improvement. The effects are generally stronger for the beneficiaries in the highest quartile of expenditures.
The US spends significantly more money as a percentage of GDP on health care than any other OECD country and more importantly, this amount is anticipated to increase exponentially. In this high cost environment, two important trends have occurred: (1) the movement to managed care, and (2) large investments in Information Systems/Information Technology (IS/IT). Managed care has emerged as an attempt to provide good quality yet cost effective health care treatment. Its implications are not well discussed in the literature while, its impact on different types of medical group practices is even less well understood. The repercussions of the large investments in IS/IT on the health care sector in general and on the medical group practice in particular, although clearly of importance, are also largely ignored by the literature. This study attempts to address this significant void in the literature. By analyzing three different types of group practices; an Independent Practice Association (IPA), a Faculty Practice and a Multi Specialty Group Practice in a managed care environment during their implementation of practice management/billing systems, we are able to draw some conclusions regarding the impacts of these two central trends on health care in general as well as on the medical group practice in particular.
This paper empirically investigates the phenomenon known as "cost shifting" across inpatient and outpatient hospital services. That is, we examine whether, when faced with lower government reimbursement for outpatient services, providers raise inpatient prices for non-government patients (and analogously for lower inpatient government reimbursement). Using a panel of hospitals from Washington State, we find that private, nonprofit hospitals do cost shift across types of services. We also find that a firm's cost shifting behavior differs based on the type government insurance program (i.e., Medicare versus Medicaid). Government owned hospitals do not cost shift with respect to any type of government insurance plan.
The females of many species of primates settle for life within the home ranges of their mothers, whereas males disperse as immatures. According to the theory of sex allocation, the costs incurred by mothers through local competition for resources with their philopatric daughters should favour the evolution of male-biased sex ratios at birth. I report here two tests of this hypothesis based on data from 15 genera of primates. First, I show that the intensity of competition for resources within kin groups is strongly and positively correlated with sex ratios at birth. Second, I show that sex ratios at birth are higher in genera with female-biased philopatry than in genera in which philopatry is not female-biased. These analyses suggest that local resource competition among kin powerfully influences the evolution of sex ratios in primates.
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This article considers the role of accounting information embedded in the income statement of health care providers in their increasingly difficult economic environment. This turbulent economic environment has resulted from the dramatic shift in power from the seller to the buyer of health care services, with a consequential shift of risks that will mandate that health care providers obtain access to better cost and utilization information. This article looks at the 2 critical components of the income statement--the revenue function and the cost structure-in terms of their importance in the management of enhanced economic performance in both the fee-for-service and the prepaid provision of health care services.
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