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PPI Expands Indexes for Health Care Services by Payer TypePayer-type indexes for specific health care servicesEffective with the release of Producer Price Index (PPI) data for July 2014, the PPI program expanded the industry and commodity (wherever-provided) data publication structures for health care services to provide detailed service line indexes based on payer type. (See table 1 and table 2 for the lists of aggregate indexes affected by this change. Previously, the PPI had only published payer-type indexes for general medical and surgical hospitals, home health care services, and nursing care facilities.) This expansion introduces payer-specific index series that measure price changes within each health care service aggregate index when adequate revenue data and price quotation information exist to differentiate by payer type. For example, table 3 provides the new commodity-based structure for physician care, which encompasses detailed indexes for Medicare patients, Medicaid patients, private insurance patients, and all other patients. To facilitate calculation of these indexes, price quotations for health care services have been assigned to payer-type indexes based on the payer of the plurality of the expected reimbursement.
Aggregate health care indexes for Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and other payersThe expansion of payer-type detail for commodity indexes allows for the calculation of four new aggregate indexes organized by payer type. These indexes, along with their respective relative importance figures as of June 2014, are listed in table 4. These aggregate indexes are constructed using the detailed payer-type commodity indexes for specific health care services listed in table 2. The weightings of the component commodity indexes are used to calculate the aggregate indexes by payer type. As with almost all PPI commodity indexes, the primary data source for index weights is revenue data from the U.S. Census Bureau (Census). Secondary data sources were used to apportion the Census data by payer type. These new indexes will allow data users to evaluate health care inflation for different patient populations. For example, the Health care services, Medicare patients index combines price data for transactions from the various commodity indexes listed in table 2, where the primary payer is Medicare. Get dataData for these indexes appear in tables 11 and 13 of the PPI Detailed Report and are available online through the PPI Commodity Database. For more informationFor further information about PPI Health care services indexes, contact John Lucier at Lucier.John@bls.gov or Jason Carnival at Carnival.Jason@bls.gov. For general PPI information, contact the PPI Section of Index Analysis and Public Information at ppi-info@bls.gov or (202) 691-7705.
Last Modified Date: August 15, 2014 |