American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Detecting Potential Overbilling in Medicare Reimbursement via Hours Worked: Reply
American Economic Review
vol. 110,
no. 12, December 2020
(pp. 4004–10)
Abstract
Matsumoto (2020) pointed out data and coding errors in Fang and Gong (2017). We show that these errors have limited impacts: all qualitative findings remain after correcting them. Matsumoto also discussed potential service overcounting in the aggregated utilization data we used to illustrate our method, and then quantified the extent of overcounting with a sample of Medicare claims. We acknowledge the issue but discuss the noise and the bias in his quantification. Overall, our proposed method remains useful, as regulators who are interested in applying the method are unlikely to be subject to the data limitations.Citation
Fang, Hanming, and Qing Gong. 2020. "Detecting Potential Overbilling in Medicare Reimbursement via Hours Worked: Reply." American Economic Review, 110 (12): 4004–10. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20191970Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- H51 National Government Expenditures and Health
- I13 Health Insurance, Public and Private
- I18 Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
- J22 Time Allocation and Labor Supply
- J44 Professional Labor Markets; Occupational Licensing