Compare and Contrast Essay on Local and Regional Variation in Health Care Spending

Introduction

Americans pay higher costs for health care than citizens of other nations; this is true of prices for physicians particularly specialists and proceduralists, and for non-physician services and goods like technologies, imaging, and drugs. This paper is a review of the Zhang, Bik, Fendrick, and Baicker's article Comparing Local and Regional Variation in Health Care Spending.

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The authors give a better understanding of their readers on why the health care costs in America are high. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of their topic by explaining how they compared differences in medical costs from 3436 hospital service areas in 306 HRRs relating to the disparity in expenses and use of medical care and prescription drugs (Zhang et al., 2012). The rationale of their study was to assess the efficacy of strategies targeted at distinct stages of aggregation.

The data used was from medical and pharmaceutical views from 2006 to 2009. The author's hypothesis is on the impact of use and costs for medical aid and prescription drugs among health beneficiaries in different regions. The research methods used are not the best since they do not offer a suitable form of examining the inadequacies of the health system in America. The authors used secondary controlled data for well-being qualities at individual levels since it would not require participants to consent and preferred beneficiaries in their old adulthood to make sure there is no impact on the outcomes by a small number of incapacitated receivers of medical aid. Understanding the association between health care costs and results can be well achieved by carrying out natural field experimentations (Doyle, 2007).

Random sampling for 5% of medical beneficiaries from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services is used. Recruitments were done yearly from 2007 to 2009 on recipients enrolled for a month in parts A, B, and D treatment medication plans. The total sample size is 3,060,322 beneficiaries based on their residential ZIP Code with each of them assigned to one of the 3436 HSAs. Demographic traits were ethnic groups (Asian, Hispanic, non-Hispanic black, non-white Hispanic and other), race, sex, and age. The authors collected data from part D state low-income aids and variables indicating health insurance, and data pooling was done for the three years. Analysis on broad regions can be generalized to homogeneous patient populations.

The authors present their results in a user-friendly way by using elaborate tables. Their findings suggest that there have been fewer benefits in survival in regions with higher spending growth."For the high costs, 52% of HSAs were found in HRRs that spend highly while 46% of high costs were located in regions that spent less" (Zhang et al. 2012, 1729)It is not easy to blame regional diversity completely on the current payment system because all the findings on regional progress generates from populations in the fee-for-service scheme.The authors admit that "their findings cannot indicate the right level for policy aggregation" (Zhang et al. 2012, 1730) thus more research ought to be done to analyze how policy focus can completely influence HRR to endorse the best application of medical care and services.

Conclusion

Concludingly, I think that additional natural experiments on local and regional variation in adjustments of risk upshots ought to be precedence. Expectations of unvarying hospital distinction will hence be justified and provide strategic decisions to restructure and improve care to eradicate unnecessary and wasteful services.

References

Doyle Jr, J. J. (2007). Returns to local-area health care spending: using health shocks to patients far from home (No. w13301). National Bureau of Economic Research.

Zhang, Y., Baik, S. H., Fendrick, A. M., & Baicker, K. (2012). Comparing local and regional variation in health care spending. New England Journal of Medicine, 367(18), 1724-1731.