Kevin Griffith

Happening tomorrow, 11AM EST or 8AM Pacific!

A children's hospital is renamed for Dolly Parton and hopes to transform pediatric care in Tennessee Dolly Parton’s name might inspire full-throated sing-a-longs to her working woman’s anthem “9 to 5,” or evoke memories of thrilling days spent at her Dollywood theme park.

“Dolly Parton Children’s Hospital did not share how much Parton donated as part of the naming announcement. But Matt Schaefer, its president and CEO, said her support would ensure ‘every child who walks through our doors receives the treatment they deserve.’”

GOD BLESS DOLLY PARTON

Iran is learning why we can't have Medicare for All

Addendum: we know work requirements impede coverage and access.

That said, our results also suggest that from a harm reduction standpoint, Medicaid expansion + work requirements was clearly better* than no expansion at all.

*YMMV in Georgia

The image is a line graph from KFF titled "The Medicaid Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) Program Finds that Medicaid Pays Most Outlays Properly." It displays a comparison of Medicaid overall improper payment rate estimates, showing two lines: "Proper payments" in blue and "Improper payments" in green. The graph covers the years 2009 to 2025 on the x-axis, with a percentage scale from 0% to 100% on the y-axis. A note at the bottom clarifies that "improper payments" are not indicative of fraud.

Federal audits show most Medicaid payments (94% in 2025) meet requirements and that most improper payments are due to insufficient documentation.

More on Medicaid payment errors as well as upcoming changes and impacts: https://on.kff.org/3MAirwJ

Health Access & Prevention Under Arkansas’ Market-Based Medicaid Expansion AbstractIntroduction. Arkansas expanded Medicaid in 2014 using a Section 1115 waiver that included premium assistance for beneficiaries to purchase private

🚨New research in Health Affairs Scholar!

Arkansas had some of the nation's strictest Medicaid eligibility rules, and the highest rates of uninsurance among low-income adults.

What changed after their unique 2014 Medicaid expansion? 🧵

LINK: nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Bottom line: These results don't prove Arkansas's model is superior, as the state had more room to improve.

But they suggest market-based expansions can achieve comparable gains and may be more acceptable to conservative policymakers in holdout states. FIN.

Difference-in-differences models showed Arkansas gains exceeded traditional expansion states for insurance (+4.7pp) and checkups (+7.3pp).

However, both groups improved similarly on other measures.

The findings: Arkansas started from a much lower baseline but achieved dramatic catch-up:

• Insurance coverage: +26.3pp
• Have a regular provider: +7.9pp
• Annual checkups: +19.3pp
• Reduced cost-related care avoidance: -14.3pp

Arkansas's approach was distinctive:

1. Expansion enrollees bought ACA Marketplace plans (not traditional Medicaid)

2. Temporary work requirements (2018, 1st in nation, later struck down)

3. Required enrollees to pay partial premiums (2017 onward)

Health Access & Prevention Under Arkansas’ Market-Based Medicaid Expansion AbstractIntroduction. Arkansas expanded Medicaid in 2014 using a Section 1115 waiver that included premium assistance for beneficiaries to purchase private

🚨New research in Health Affairs Scholar!

Arkansas had some of the nation's strictest Medicaid eligibility rules, and the highest rates of uninsurance among low-income adults.

What changed after their unique 2014 Medicaid expansion? 🧵

LINK: nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

The farther down this rabbit hole I go the crazier it gets.

The WSJ *editorial board* smeared Stacie and called for defunding MedPAC on the basis of a single Health Affairs Scholar paper coauthored by four people at CMS — including politicals, maybe all politicals? — none of whom has a PhD.

‘I Felt Like a Factory Worker.’ Why VA Psychologists Are Burning Out

Register for our upcoming webinar with @joannespetz.bsky.social!

healtheconomics.org/events

Fused LASSO doesn't shrink coefficients towards zero; the penalties cause coefficients with similar magnitudes to move towards one another. So you end up with fewer groupings, but not too few your predictions suffer

Two reasons

1) Random effects require much stronger assumptions that are unlikely to be met

2) We aren't trying to shrink coefficients towards zero. We are trying to empirically bin coefficients with similar effect sizes in a way that maintains predictive accuracy and removes our subjectivity

Has anyone implemented fused LASSO in Stata to group or bin coefficients for dummy variables?

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

One week from today!

I've had so many conversations with people who are worried about the direction of #healthequity research -- the lack of rigor, the lack of theory, and overstatement of findings.

Worse yet is the defiant attitude by some that any effort to push on nuance or causality undermines the project.

Advancing the Science and Scholarship of Health Equity Health equity research has advanced substantially during the past 2 decades and has emerged as a foundational element of population health science and scholarship.1 JAMA Health Forum has embraced thi...

"When researchers cannot specify and be transparent about what equity means in their work, it risks becoming an aesthetic rather than a commitment."

Sharp piece by Choi et al outling several issues with contemporary research that have increasingly troubled me.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Assuming our history isn't sanitized, this period will be remembered as one of national shame.

www.yahoo.com/news/article...

Five classes I took in university (that I realize most people could use right now):

Research methodology
Statistics
Logic
Epistomolgy
Abnormal psychology

How it started / How it's going

They're trying so hard to justify a murder. And every American should know: if they kill you, this is what they'll do to you.

Central bank independence in practice The Peterson Institute for International Economics held a high-level conference in October 2025 in Washington, DC, to analyze the serious issues concerning central bank independence in practice. The g...

Good time to brush up on what the experts say on the topic: Central bank independence in practice www.piie.com/publications...

45 minutes until markets open

Now would be a really great time for Congress to reassert itself as a co-equal branch of government

It's now multiple pages