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Publication alert: The geography of Medicare’s hospital value-based purchasing

Medicare presently withholds 2% of participating hospitals’ base operating Medicare Severity Diagnosis-Related Group (MS-DRG) payment amounts and redistributes it based on relative performance and demonstrated improvement. It is supposed to function as a reward for hospitals doing well and a motivator for those not. In 2019, the amount redistributed was $1.9 billion, with 44% of…

Improving upon a bar graph

In my preceding post, I showed how to replicate a typical Quickstats graph from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But such a bar graph is rather information-poor. There are only 24 pieces of data: the mean and the 95% confidence limit for each of the sex-age strata. (You could argue that the upper…


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