I'm teaching two MBA classes this semester: Health Strategy and Managerial Economics. If you are an instructor and my slides might be useful for you, please DM me. I'll send them over.

If you're in San Antonio tomorrow, 2:30 PM Friday, please join us at @uchicagopress booth #303 at ASSA, for a giveaway of BETTER HEALTH ECONOMICS. We’ll have fifty copies on hand, first come, first serve. There will also be drinks, depending on Texas law and conference rules.

Thank you everyone who pre-ordered Better Health Economics, my new book with @ProfNoto. For everyone else, you can DM / email me for review material, class notes, slides, etc. You can also just request an instructor copy here:.

If you sketch slides with pencil and paper, ChatGPT can convert them into Beamer.

You can also request an instructor’s review copy by following the link on the book’s publisher website, here.

If you teach health economics, please email or DM me to get access to an early (protected) PDF of the book. We hope you’ll consider adopting it for spring courses. It’s inexpensive and very suitable for students of any level.

Here's the Amazon link. and the official page.

The amazing team at @UChicagoPress helped us through the entire process. The book will be available wherever you get your books this January. In fact, you can pre-order a copy now on the press's web site or on Amazon.

We wrote a non-traditional textbook, a summary of what health economics is and why we love the field. We wrote the book to be a readable, fun tour of what our field has to offer. We hope you like it and buy multiple copies.

May I have your attention please: @ProfNoto and I wrote a book. We are pleased to announce. Better Health Economics: An Introduction for Everyone

Wrote up a short summary of my paper with @prinzdani and @timothyjlayton for HBR here:.

The paper is out this morning as an NBER Working Paper. Link Below.

So, bottom line, when policymakers play with hospital reimbursement, they not only change the price of each visit, they also end up changing the quantity of visits provided.

In order to treat more Medicare patients, hospitals hired more nurses and shortened average length of stay. Here's the same binned scatter plot, but looking at the change in average length of stay for Medicare patients.

Here's one way to see the key result of the paper: a binned scatterplot. The vertical axis plots hospitals' change in Medicare visits before and after the policy change; the horizontal axis plots hospitals' change in reimbursement.

We find a big effect: hospitals that saw an increase in their Medicare reimbursement rates started to admit more Medicare patients. The key elasticity is close to unity: a 10 percent increase in Medicare reimbursement leads to 10 percent more Medicare patients.

To answer that question, we study how hospitals responded to a 2008 policy change that transformed the way that Medicare calculated their per-visit rates. Some hospitals saw a big increase in their reimbursement, others saw a big decrease.

A key question: how do hospitals respond when their per-visit reimbursement rate changes? The answer is not obvious. And a legitimate null hypothesis is that hospitals don't respond at all. Hospitalizations are extreme events that cannot be manipulated for financial reasons.

A big part of health policy centers on figuring out how to pay hospitals. There now exists an alphabet soup of federal programs that change how much Medicare pays hospitals: HACRP, HRRP, and HVBPP, to name a few.

New Working Paper: “Regulated Revenues and Hospital Behavior: Evidence from a Medicare Overhaul.” This is joint work with @adamess, @maggieshi311, and David Silver. 🧵.