Health affairs
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The world faces a worsening public health crisis: A growing number of bacteria are resistant to available antibiotics. Yet there are few new antibiotics in the development pipeline to take the place of these increasingly ineffective drugs. ⋯ As an alternative, we recommend a two-prong, "integrated" strategy. This would increase reimbursement for the appropriate, evidence-based use of antibiotics that also met specific public health goals--such as reducing illness levels while limiting antibiotic resistance.
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Eager to reduce unnecessary use of hospital emergency departments by Medicaid enrollees, states are increasingly implementing cost sharing for nonemergency visits. This paper uses monthly data from the 2001-2006 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys (MEPS) to examine how changes in nine states' copayment policies influence enrollees' use of emergency departments. The results suggest that requiring copayments for nonemergency visits did not decrease emergency department use by Medicaid enrollees. Future research should examine more closely the effects at the state level and investigate whether these copayments affected the use of other services, such as hospitalizations or visits to physicians by Medicaid enrollees.
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Physicians contend that the threat of malpractice lawsuits forces them to practice defensive medicine, which in turn raises the cost of health care. This argument underlies efforts to change malpractice laws through legislative tort reform. ⋯ We also found relatively modest differences in physicians' concerns across states with and without common tort reforms. These results suggest that many policies aimed at controlling malpractice costs may have a limited effect on physicians' malpractice concerns.