Question

Do you think healthcare outcomes are negatively impacted when patients are required to change to a provider in a network? Explain.

Answer 1

Ans) Healthcare stereotyping can negatively affect patient outcomes. Stereotyping patients according to their age, race, weight, socioeconomic status, gender or other factors can have negative impacts on their health, according to new research. These people were worse off health-wise and less likely to seek treatment.

-  Cross-sectional variation across markets in managed care activity, raising questions about whether the relationship between managed care activity and outcomes that we observed is causal.

- The primary concern is that managed care market structure may be endogenous with respect to the outcomes we studied. However, this is unlikely for several reasons. First, we studied practice patterns for a single condition, myocardial infarction. Entry decisions of managed care organizations are unlikely to be driven by local practice patterns for one condition. Nonetheless, if practice patterns are correlated across conditions and are related to entry decisions, the possibility of endogeneity remains.

- Second, models include the 1987 AAPCC to control for variation across-market areas in historical costs of care for Medicare beneficiaries, which should capture variations in practice patterns across many conditions. This reduces the possibility that our estimates are biased by entry of managed care organizations into markets based on these patterns. Finally, the available evidence suggests that demand for managed care organizations was greatest in markets in which health care costs were high or increasingly rapidly. If this were the case, any endogeneity bias would be in the opposite direction from our results.

- In addition, although our results do not provide evidence that changes in treatment patterns affected patient mortality, changes in treatment patterns may have affected health outcomes related to quality of life that we were unable to measure.