View Research by Author - Adela Luque

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Asthma is one of the most common chronic conditions among children in the United States, affecting nearly 10 percent of children in 2008. Medicaid and CHIP are covering a growing number of asthmatic children; by 2008, two-thirds of low-income asthmatic children were covered by Medicaid/CHIP. Our findings suggest that over the last decade, there has been a trend towards improvement in asthma-related outcomes and receipt of parental asthma management training for asthmatic children with Medicaid/CHIP coverage. Further expansions in health insurance coverage could lead to reductions in negative asthma outcomes and their associated costs, but other changes to the service delivery system would be needed as well.

In 2005, CMS implemented a prospective payment system (PPS) to pay for Medicare services provided by inpatient psychiatric facilities (IPFs). Using FY 2003 administrative data, this study independently replicates the analyses used in developing the IPF PPS. It considers alternative comorbidity classifiers and conducts the first facility-level analyses of the IPF-PPS. Payments are found to vary less than proportionately with costs at the facility level, suggesting payments may not fully reflect the higher costs of facilities that treat sicker patients. It also demonstrates how an expansion of the current set of comorbidities would more closely match payments to patient costs.

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