Uwe Reinhardt - Research

Research

Reinhardt's most recent research has focused on hospital pricing, systems of health care around the world, Medicare reform, and health care spending. His work has appeared in Health Affairs, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and The British Medical Journal.

In a recent paper, Reinhardt discusses the obstacles to success of consumer-directed health care in light of the lack of transparency in hospital pricing. Reinhardt suggests several reforms that could lead to better information on hospital pricing for consumer decision-making, including a national set of Diagnosis-related group weights to which each hospital could then apply their own conversion factor. Reinhardt's previous work on hospitals examined the tax and cost of equity capital advantages of not-for-profit hospitals over for-profit hospitals.

Reinhardt's scholarship has often analyzed the U.S. health care industry in relation to systems around the world. He has argued that higher U.S. health spending is a result of higher U.S. per capita gross domestic product (GDP) as well as intricate and disjointed payment systems. Reinhardt's work on foreign systems of health care includes a recent analysis of Switzerland that appeared in JAMA. Reinhardt argues that there is little correlation between the prevalence of consumer choice and the high quality of Swiss health care.

In 2003, Reinhardt, along with 14 other prominent health policy experts and private health care industry leaders, signed an open letter arguing that Medicare should lead the U.S. health care industry in paying for performance by tying financial reimbursement to quality measures.

Reinhardt's work on health care spending includes his argument that the aging of the U.S. population is not the primary cause of the growth in U.S. health care spending.