National Institute of Aging, Medical MalPractice, Healthcare Costs, and Technology Adoption
The Welfare Effects of Medical Malpractice Liability
Principal Investigator: Darius Lakdawalla
We use variation in the generosity of local juries to identify the causal impact of malpractice liability on social welfare. Growth in malpractice payments over the last decade and a half contributed at most 5 percentage points to the 33% total real growth in medical expenditures. On the other hand, malpractice leads to modest mortality reductions; the value of these more than likely exceeds the costs of malpractice liability. Therefore, reducing malpractice cost is unlikely to have a major impact on health care spending, and unlikely to be cost-effective over conventionally accepted values of a statistical life.
National Institute of Aging, Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation
Principal Investigator: Dana Goldman
The Roybal Center is a collaborative effort between USC and the RAND Corporation. The mission of the Roybal Center for Health Policy Simulation is to develop better models to understand the consequences of biomedical developments and social forces for health, health spending and health care delivery. In 2010, the Roybal Center moved to USC’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. Funded by the National Institute on Aging since 2004, the Roybal Center supports the Future Elderly Model (FEM), a multi-year effort to identify and forecast the consequences of medical breakthroughs over the next 30 years, and the role that regulation plays in promoting or hindering global innovation. The FEM has already begun to shape the national discussion about the role that medical technology will play in explaining health and health care spending. The FEM has also provided the first quantifiable model of the long-run population health consequences of pharmaceutical regulation.
The Future Elderly Model
The Future Elderly Model is a demographic and economic simulation model designed to predict the future costs and health status of the elderly and explore what current trends or future shifts imply for policy. Developed by Dana Goldman and his colleagues at the USC and RAND Roybal Center, the model uses a representative sample of approximately 100,000 Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and over drawn from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Surveys, national surveys that ask Medicare beneficiaries about chronic conditions, use of health care services, medical care spending, and health insurance coverage. Each beneficiary in the sample is linked to Medicare claims records to track actual medical care use and costs over time.
Learn more at: http://roybal.healthpolicy.usc.edu.
MacArthur Foundation, Costs and Benefits of Interventions
Principal Investigator: Dana Goldman
The Science of Medicare Reform
Principal Investigator: Dana P. Goldman, Ph.D.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded more than $5 million to Dr. Goldman to lead a multidisciplinary team spanning four research institutions to study specific applications of comparative effectiveness research (CER) to the Medicare program. This study will examine consumer plan choice in the Medicare Part D marketplace; investigate how formulary and benefit design affects competition, utilization, health and spending; and apply comparative effectiveness analysis to identify clinical areas for potential savings.
Use of Behavioral Economics to Improve Treatment of Acute Respiratory Infections
Principal Investigator: Jason N. Doctor, Ph.D.
The University of Southern California School of Pharmacy received an $11.5 million grant to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing for acute respiratory infections through the use of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics introduces small changes to the clinical environment designed to “nudge” physicians toward guideline compliance without restricting their freedom to choose the treatments they think are best for their patients and is an effort to translate basic behavioral science into clinical research. The study is a cluster randomized trial involving 42 clinic sites in different regions of the United States and involves researchers from Harvard, Northwestern University, RAND, and UCLA
We use variation in the generosity of local juries to identify the causal impact of malpractice liability on social welfare. Growth in malpractice payments over the last decade and a half contributed at most 5 percentage points to the 33% total real growth in medical expenditures. On the other hand, malpractice leads to modest mortality reductions; the value of these more than likely exceeds the costs of malpractice liability. Therefore, reducing malpractice cost is unlikely to have a major impact on health care spending, and unlikely to be cost-effective over conventionally accepted values of a statistical life.