I've updated my CMS Provider of Services hospital directory data to run through 2025. I rewrote the processing code in R (with Claude + a lot of careful supervision). There's also a new downloader script to make it easy to pull in new source data from CMS. github.com/asacarny/pro...

GitHub - asacarny/provider-of-services: Code to process the CMS Provider of Services hospital data

Code to process the CMS Provider of Services hospital data - asacarny/provider-of-services

github.com

Our paper on hospitals gaming Medicare payments AKA "turbocharging" (with Atul Gupta and @ambarlaforgia.bsky.social) is now in print! Ungated download here: sacarny.com/wp-content/u...

AEA Journals@aeajournals.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "Turbocharging Profits? Contract Gaming and Revenue Allocation in Healthcare" by Atul Gupta, Ambar La Forgia, and Adam Sacarny. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

My (41M) 17 antagonistic agents have unionized

Cool #ASHEcon #ASHEcon2026 session alert: new work on hospital medical debt, private equity, and for-profit psychiatric hospitals! ft. @ambarlaforgia.bsky.social + me + others not on bluesky ⏰ Today! (Tuesday) 3:30-5pm 📍Hyatt Regency Greenway I 2nd Fl ashecon.confex.com/ashecon/2026...

Excited for tomorrow's #ASHEcon #ASHEcon2026 session chaired by Kosali Simon! @talgross.bsky.social will present new work our team is doing on nursing home payment and quality of care (discussant: Brian McGarry) ⏰ Monday 8:30-10am 📍Hyatt Regency Lakeshore B 1st Fl ashecon.confex.com/ashecon/2026...

Supposedly they are shutting down ResDAC in 5 weeks, and, I’m told, replacing them with a totally novice firm with no experience/expertise in Medicare data.

In a worker-firm effects (AKM) model, the worker+firm effects are only separately identified within mobility groups - the subgraphs of workers+firms connected by workers moving across firms. Something I just learned: the mobility groups for OLS vs. Poisson estimators are not necessarily the same.

I am blown away at how much faster Poisson regression runs in R with fixest/fepois than in Stata with ppmlhdfe. The speedup is on the order of 10x in our sample. We are doing bayesian bootstrap, i.e. we run the regression at least 300 times, so this is really helpful.

There are two Claudes

Our @jamahealthforum.com paper, "Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Reminder Emails, Program Use, and Prescribing" has been selected as a JAMA Network Clinical Trial of the Year! Read it here: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Reminder Emails, Program Use, and Prescribing

This randomized clinical trial investigates whether email communications increase clinician use of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs to reduce guideline-discordant prescribing.

jamanetwork.com

I have learned that young researchers are running linear regression on large datasets and calling it “fwlmaxxing”

AI not liking my meeting style

Now available: my hospital cost report (HCRIS) code downloads and processes SNF cost reports, too. I've only tested it a little, so take with a grain of salt and let me know how it works for you! For now, it's a separate branch in the repository here: github.com/asacarny/hos...

GitHub - asacarny/hospital-cost-reports at add-snf

Code to process the CMS hospital cost reports (HCRIS) and cost report datasets - asacarny/hospital-cost-reports

github.com

Collaborator with AI-enabled Zoom was offline yesterday so I had to take notes by hand during the project call (this is also the plot of The Pitt season 2)

ChatGPT now insisting against all reason that Anderson, Indiana was a Metropolitan Statistical Area in 2020. So far it has linked to the 2020 OMB PDF, given me a page number, and provided a text extract showing it as an MSA. (Anderson, Indiana wasn't an MSA in 2020, all of this was hallucinated!!!)

CMS makes it official: no plans to cancel physical Medicare and Medicaid data access, forcing everyone to use the VRDC enclave. Instead, some more paperwork to make and extend DUAs – which is way better than what they were proposing!

It's that time of year again!! Attn all NYC-area health economists, submit your papers and mark your calendars for NYC Health Econ Day 2026 on Friday, May 1 at NYU Wagner. More info here: www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-s...

I'm on the #EconJobMarket! I study how policies and childhood environments shape outcomes of low-income & vulnerable kids. In my JMP, I study the effects of allowing youth who would have aged out of foster care at 18 to stay until 21—offering support their peers not in foster care get from parents.

Do you love health economics and learning about cool new research? Do you like telling other people about it? Come and be a social media editor at AJHE!! We're looking for someone to join our editorial team @ashecon.bsky.social

This is *extremely* bad (for the accuracy of my paper introductions about tech adoption)

Aaron Schwartz@aschwartz.bsky.social · 9mo ago

...we were wrong. A trial in this month's NEJM confirms what many cardiologists had already come to realize: beta blockers don't help most of the time in the reperfusion era. (2/2) www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

@allanmjoseph.bsky.social has been telling me there needs to be a "Dartmouth Atlas, but for pediatrics" for maybe a literal decade? And now there is! (h/t to coauthor @johngraves.bsky.social)

Development of an Atlas for US Pediatric Acute Care

This cross-sectional study offers a national US atlas of pediatric acute care centers in the US.

jamanetwork.com

Fun fact: you can estimate a conditional logit by running a fixed effects Poisson. They yield the same estimates and standard errors - they maximize the same likelihood. Poisson regression forever!

Very excited this is coming out soon! cc @ambarlaforgia.bsky.social

AEA Journals@aeajournals.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "Turbocharging Profits? Contract Gaming and Revenue Allocation in Healthcare" by Atul Gupta, Ambar La Forgia, and Adam Sacarny. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

I thought I'd put the administration's proposed "compact" with universities in context, so I wrote the blog post below. It's especially for journalists covering this story! Many details about how the compact itself works and why the administration has retreated to this strategy.

The 2025 academic econ job market is trending better than the first COVID market year but worse than the rest of 2019-present www.davidvandijcke.com/joe_tracker/

The bus I've been taking this week makes local stops then runs on the highway. Like the bus in the movie Speed. It's all I can think about on my way in.

Out today in @jamapsychiatry.com: we find that inpatient psychiatric bed supply increasingly comes from freestanding psychiatric hospitals in large for-profit chains. Authors: Karen Shen @johnshopkinssph.bsky.social Mark Olfson @columbiapsych.bsky.social + me jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

National Trends in Inpatient Psychiatric Bed Supply, 2011 to 2023

This cross-sectional study discusses trends in inpatient psychiatric bed supplies.

jamanetwork.com

Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting the Broad Street pump! Sadly, I saw that the pump handle had been removed. I worked to reinstall the pump handle so local residents would not be deprived of this vital resource. So glad to bring some of the latest American public health ingenuity to London!

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements This is a big deal

News reports say Columbia paid a "fine" of $200 million, which is grossly excessive, given the lack of any government authority to impose such a fine. On the blog, I parse the agreement and the stakes to explain what the dollar figure really reflects and its ominous implications. 👇