Hospital Pricing.

This topic uses the HCRIS Repo.

1. What is the effect of hospital profit status on hospital prices?

Data on hospital for-profit versus not-for-profit status is available from the Provider of Services files, which I will provide for anyone interested. The data are publicly available, but I have the data already clean so I’ll spare you some extra work here!

2. How did Medicaid expansion affect hospital “bad debt”?

Data on Medicaid expansion are available from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is part of the ACS and Medicaid Expansion Repo. You will also need to find “bad debt” in the hospital cost reports and edit the code file accordingly.

Demand for Cigarettes.

This topic uses the CDC Tax Burden on Tobacco Repo.

3. How do smoking regulations affect cigarette demand?

Data on smoking laws (such as clean indoor air laws) are available from the State Tobacco Activities Tracking and Evaluation System: CDC smoking regulations link.

4. What is the effect of smoking on obesity?

Data on obesity rates at the state level are avalable from the CDC Overweight and Obesity datasets: CDC obesity link.

Medicare Advantage.

This topic uses the Medicare Advantage Repo

5. Did the quality improvement program increase quality?

Details of the MA quality improvement program can be found here.

6. Do higher-rated contracts charge higher premiums?

This can be answered using the existing Medicare Advantage repo. While this project doesn’t require any additional data collection, it is a challenging exercise and will take additional time to understand the nature of Medicare Advantage premiums. Total time is comparable to other topics.

Medicaid Expansion.

This topic uses the ACS and Medicaid Expansion Repo.

7. Does health insurance improve health?

Data on health trends at different geographic levels is available from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System: BRFSS data link.

8. Does Medicaid crowd-out private health insurance?

This can be answered using the existing ACS and Medicaid Expansion repo. While this project doesn’t require any additional data collection, it is a challenging exercise and will take additional time to understand the nature of the Medicaid and private health insurance markets. Total time is comparable to other topics.

Other topics

While you have wide discretion to select a topic of your choosing, it should remain within the world of health policy and healthcare markets. Additionally, some ideas are better than others, and some ideas are easier than others. When selecting a topic, ask yourself the following questions: What issues are you passionate about? and Where can your voice make a difference? You will be working on this project for an entire semester, so you should pick something you are excited, inspired, motivated, or angry about rather than something that sounds like it will be easy. Also, you are an undergraduate student at Emory living in Georgia. Are there specific issues where your voice, perspective, or framing is especially useful?

Selecting sources

Not all sources are equally good. In fact, many sources are bad – some intentionally misleading and others are just plain sloppy. In advocating for “research and evidence-based policy,” it’s critical your brief has a solid foundation. There are high quality sources that aren’t scholarly, of course. You may find it very useful to additionally have sources from news organizations, government websites or publications, official reports, and think tanks. The trick here is to really evaluate the quality and impartiality of the source. Look up the background of think tanks and organizations on Wikipedia or other sources and be clear about how the quality of the source shapes the arguments made in the brief.

Your sources should be carefully selected to contribute different pieces to the puzzle. Make sure you have sources about background/context, other sources more on evaluating policy, perhaps some news stories about recent events. You want your brief to be well-rounded and not missing any big gaps in pertinent information. You may not end up using all the sources in your fact sheet and policy brief, but the more sources you identify now, the easier it will be to refine your points. You may also find that as you’re working on your project, you will need to find new sources. Additionally, sources do not have to be on the exact same topic, but they should relate. Remember that there can be regional, political, and socioeconomic differences (to name a few) that might make some work not generally applicable.

Writing annotations

The annotated bibliography will serve as the foundation for the basic facts you will outline for the reader to understand the problem at hand, and it will provide the basis of the evidence you provide to substantiate your claims. Basically, the annotated bibliography is a bibliography with a brief summary (i.e., annotation) of each source. Your annotations may include the following information:

• What question do(es) the author(s) seek to answer?
• What is the primary thesis/argument/theory of the work?
• How is this source relevant to my topic? What aspect of my research question/topic does this source illuminate?
• What are the main findings? Are there reasons to doubt the evidence? What are some of the problems (e.g. clarity, methodological issues, out-of-date) with the source?

When writing the annotation, you should provide enough information in about three to five (grammatically correct, full) sentences for readers to obtain an accurate understanding of the source’s purpose, content, and value. It should be clear how this article is contributing to your project; you may want to make this explicit. For each source, you should provide the full bibliographic citation followed by a brief analysis of the source (Citation format is your choice. Just be consistent.)

Rubric for Annotated Bibliography

The annotated bibliography is worth 20 points toward the final project grade, divided into two parts:

1. Policy Overview (10 points). In no more than 6 sentences, the overview should:
   • describe the problem you will address
   • explain why the problem is important
   • briefly reference an evidence-based policy solution to be considered in the brief
2. Annotated Bibliography (10 points). The annotated bibliography must include:
   • minimum of 8 high-quality sources, at least 6 of which are scholarly (academic, peer-reviewed or law revie) indicated by bold font
   • summarize each source, relevant data, and main contribution to the area of interest