scholarly journals How does Risk Selection Respond to Risk Adjustment? Evidence from the Medicare Advantage Program

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Brown ◽  
Mark Duggan ◽  
Ilyana Kuziemko ◽  
William Woolston
2016 ◽  
Vol 74 (6) ◽  
pp. 736-749 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Goldberg ◽  
Amal N. Trivedi ◽  
Vincent Mor ◽  
Hye-Young Jung ◽  
Momotazur Rahman

The 2003 Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) increased payments to Medicare Advantage plans and instituted a new risk-adjustment payment model to reduce plans’ incentives to enroll healthier Medicare beneficiaries and avoid those with higher costs. Whether the MMA reduced risk selection remains debatable. This study uses mortality differences, nursing home utilization, and switch rates to assess whether the MMA successfully decreased risk selection from 2000 to 2012. We found no decrease in the mortality difference or adjusted difference in nursing home use between plan beneficiaries pre- and post the MMA. Among beneficiaries with nursing home use, disenrollment from Medicare Advantage plans declined from 20% to 12%, but it remained 6 times higher than the switch rate from traditional Medicare to Medicare Advantage. These findings suggest that the MMA was not associated with reductions in favorable risk selection, as measured by mortality, nursing home use, and switch rates.


2014 ◽  
Vol 104 (10) ◽  
pp. 3335-3364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Brown ◽  
Mark Duggan ◽  
Ilyana Kuziemko ◽  
William Woolston

To combat adverse selection, governments increasingly base payments to health plans and providers on enrollees' scores from risk-adjustment formulae. In 2004, Medicare began to risk-adjust capitation payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to reduce selection-driven overpayments. But because the variance of medical costs increases with the predicted mean, incentivizing enrollment of individuals with higher scores can increase the scope for enrolling “overpriced” individuals with costs significantly below the formula's prediction. Indeed, after risk adjustment, MA plans enrolled individuals with higher scores but lower costs conditional on their score. We find no evidence that overpayments were on net reduced. (JEL G22, H51, I13, I18)


2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (Supplement) ◽  
pp. 75-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Glazer ◽  
Thomas G. McGuire

Abstract In many countries, competition among health plans or sickness funds raises issues of risk selection. Funds may discourage or encourage potential enrollees from joining, and these actions may have efficiency or fairness implications. This article reviews the experience in the U.S., and comments on the evidence for risk selection in Germany. There is little evidence that risk selection causes efficiency problems in Germany, but risk selection does lead to an inequality in contribution rates. A simple approach to equalizing contribution rates that does not involve risk adjustment is presented and discussed.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Ulrika Winblad ◽  
David Isaksson ◽  
Paula Blomqvist

Abstract A primary care choice reform launched in Sweden in 2010 led to a rapid growth of private providers. Critics feared that the reform would lead to an increased tendency among new, profit-driven, providers, to select patients with lower health risks. Even if open risk selection is prohibited, providers can select patients in more subtle ways, such as establishing their practices in areas with higher health status. This paper investigates to what extent strategies were employed by local governments to avoid risk selection and whether there were any differences between left- and right-wing governments in this regard. Three main strategies were used: risk adjustment of the financial reimbursements on the basis of health and/or socio-economic status of listed patients; design of patient listing systems; and regulatory requirements regarding the scope and content of the services that had to be offered by all providers. Additionally, left-wing local governments were more prone than right-wing governments to adopt risk adjustment strategies at the onset of the reform but these differences diminished over time. The findings of the paper contribute to our understanding of how social inequalities may be avoided in tax-based health care systems when market-like steering models such as patient choice are introduced.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yujing Shen ◽  
Randall P. Ellis

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (12) ◽  
pp. 2630-2640 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michael McWilliams ◽  
John Hsu ◽  
Joseph P. Newhouse

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