A new study by researchers at Yale, Stanford, and Dartmouth provides the first nationwide, small-area analysis of the variation in spending by the three main funders of health care in the United States: Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers. The researchers’ goal: to see whether there are regions that have low health spending by each of the three payers simultaneously or whether distinct factors drive health spending variation among the payers.
The finding has significant public policy implications because it suggests that policymakers should focus on payer-specific interventions that target individual sources of waste rather than searching for silver-bullet interventions, according to the researchers. Read more.
