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Healthcare jobs have grown 2x faster than the overall labor market since 1980 Healthcare overtook retail to become largest industry by employment in 2009 New working paper with Josh Gottlieb, Kevin Rinz, and Victoria Udalova w/ key facts on the rise of healthcare jobs

Patients who are trained as physicians have 19.8 percent fewer visits to the emergency department, principally due to fewer avoidable visits, from Pragya Kakani, Simone Matecna, and Amitabh Chandra nber.org/papers/w33573

Two-part article in Health Affairs Forefront with my thoughts on improving risk adjustment Actually more of a synthesis of great work and insights from the field and a set of recommendations that follows from considering it all together. This is an area where academia/health

📢New working paper with Kirill Borusyak: "Optimal Formula Instruments"! We derive the most powerful recentered IVs for treatments given by complex formulas, and propose an algorithm for approximating them in practice This approach yields *huge* power gains, relative to a

Louisiana's hepatitis C "subscription model" treatment program increased detection and treatment rates while reducing mortality and liver transplants, from Jim Flynn, Bethany I. Lemont, and @bartonwillage nber.org/papers/w33617

📢Policymakers: Want to extend Medicare solvency? Don’t count on small easy fixes. New research from Klara Lou and Melinda B. Buntin in Health Affairs Scholar shows how major legislative actions directly and indirectly constrained cost growth. Link: shorturl.at/EF0zy

Value-added estimates for 14,000 nursing homes show substantial within-market heterogeneity, pointing to gains from policies that encourage patient reallocation. Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Neale Mahoney econometricsociety.org/publications/e…

62% of Medicare Advantage enrollees were in plans that are part of contracts that offered a reward/incentive for completing a health risk assessment in 2023. Info from assessments can affect how much the government pays the plan for covering the enrollee: on.kff.org/3GvxHYj

States with community rating and guaranteed issue policies for Medigap had fewer plan offerings and higher premiums, resulting in lower enrollment compared to states without these protections. ja.ma/4jqyZlY

Reforms to the Medicare Advantage Quality Bonus Program could save the federal government $2.6 billion to $14.1 billion in 2026. ja.ma/42JQ9oM

CMS is rolling out an enhanced and accelerated Medicare Advantage contract auditing strategy to catch any cases of fraud, waste or abuse that have been hiding in the program for far too long. We are actively reviewing claims to ensure the government is being accurately billed for

Important step from CMS to begin conducting risk adjustment data validation (RADV) audits for *all* MA contracts each year. If implemented well, this could, in effect, reduce MA risk scores by a few percentage points. But a few things to keep an eye on:

New paper out with Andrew Anderson, Laura Samuel, and Kali Thomas in JAMA Health Forum on "Medicare Advantage Part B Premium Givebacks and Enrollment" BSPH / HPM Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Hopkins Nursing Hopkins Business of Health Initiative More below. jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-…

State Medigap guaranteed issue protections facilitate higher rates of switching from Medicare Advantage to traditional Medicare among beneficiaries newly diagnosed with cancer. #ARM25 AcademyHealth ja.ma/3HxfwBW

A brief thread on @cmsinnovates new model called WiSER. This model will test a highly targeted and more streamlined approach to payor review of medical services in insurance by trying it in Traditional Medicare. cms.gov/priorities/inn…. /1

This is an interesting initiative. Broader, but targeted use of prior authorization in Traditional Medicare has long struck me as low-hanging fruit. (The model's emphasis on "enhanced technologies" strikes me as mostly just marketing, but the underlying idea is sound.)

Fully integrated special needs plans for dual-eligible #Medicare beneficiaries had lower disenrollment rates compared to other Medicare Advantage plans. ja.ma/46bJ8PN Eric T. Roberts

UnitedHealth grew into a vertically integrated giant through scores of acquisitions over past 15 years, most too small to trigger FTC or SEC disclosure. Large acquisitions require antitrust preclearance, but UH quietly rolled up 1000s of local providers without anyone noticing.

There seems to be less competition in the Medicare Advantage market than some might suspect. In 2025, a single insurer had at least half of all Medicare Advantage enrollees in 44% of all counties. kff.org/medicare/issue…

🚨🚨 New Paper Alert! 🚨🚨 Together with an awesome crew, I've got a fun new paper analyzing whether hospital acquisitions of physician practices raise prices by lessening competition. Stuart Craig Aristotelis Epanomeritakis, Joe Martinez, Matt Grennan, Fiona Scott Morton, and