Ryan McDevitt

Anti-fraud lawsuits targeting hospitals for over-admitting patients saved Medicare money without increasing mortality, from @costaneffect and @jetson_econ nber.org/papers/w34938

Congrats to Brendan Herger, Miles Brown, Camden Law, and Trent McFarland for earning All-America First Team honors! #GoBlue〽️

One of the more frustrating trends in public life over the past decade is how people who lead failing institutions blame social media for their failures. A university president whose faculty have become political activists instead of educators and whose administrators multiply like rabbits will tell you that “misinformation on social networks” is eroding public trust in higher education. An editor whose publication lost its readership will claim that the real problem is X, rather than consider that the publication became boring, that the writing was uniformly uninspired, and that it stopped covering anything that mattered. A politician who loses an election will blame Meta algorithms rather than admit that voters simply did not like what was offered. A central banker whose institution missed the worst inflation in 40 years will worry publicly about TikTok videos spreading financial illiteracy. The pattern is always the same. The institution fails at its core mission. The public notices. The people in charge, rather than examining what went wrong, identify an external force that is “polarizing.” The diagnosis is never “we did a poor job.” It is never “we lost our audience because we gave them nothing worth reading.” The diagnosis is always “bad actors are distorting the conversation.” This is not new, of course. Before social media, talk radio was the scapegoat. Before talk radio, it was television. Before television, it was tabloid newspapers. Every generation of leaders has found a communication technology to blame for people’s loss of trust in them. What is new is the intensity and the shamelessness. Over the last few years, “social media” has become a universal excuse that requires no evidence and tolerates no scrutiny. It is deployed reflexively. The people who make this argument never seem to ask the obvious question: why are people on social networks so receptive to criticism of your institution in the first place? If your university were delivering excellent education at a reasonable price, no number of tweets would persuade parents otherwise. If your publication were covering important questions with clarity and substance, readers would not have migrated elsewhere. If the work you showcased were serious rather than trivial, people would still be paying attention. Trust is not destroyed by social media. Trust is destroyed by poor performance, and social media makes it harder to hide. That is a different thing entirely, and the people running these institutions know it, which is what makes the excuse so cynical. The honest version of the argument would be: “We used to be able to fail quietly because there was no mechanism for people to compare notes. Now there is, and we do not like it.” That, at least, would have the virtue of being true.

@CostAnEffect @CBSNews Someone should write a paper about this!

Great report by @CBSNews CBS News Investigation: Hundreds of LA hospices have multiple indicators of fraud | @CBSNews cbsnews.com/projects/2026/…

Brendan Herger finishes fourth in the mile! #GoBlue〽️

Brendan Herger, Will Barhite, Camden Law, and Trent McFarland earn the B1G DMR title! #GoBlue〽️

Open call for papers, Health Care Administration and Fraud. Conference to be held in Cambridge, MA on October 2, 2026. Submit papers by 11:59pm EDT on July 31, 2026. More information: nber.org/calls-papers-a…

Iron sharpens iron 😤 Congrats to our DMR squad of Brendan Herger, Miles Brown, Camden Law, and Trent McFarland for being named the USTFCCCA Athletes of the Week! #GoBlue〽️

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗦𝗺𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗱 💥 The DMR team of Brendan Herger, Miles Brown, Camden Law, and Trent McFarland cruise to a new program record! #GoBlue〽️

@ashdgandhi Thank you! High praise coming from you. I feel the same about all of your work.

This paper has a really nice result that I did not expect beforehand and felt like was obvious afterwards. (Which, for me, is the sign of a really great paper.)

@ashdgandhi @jetson_econ @PaulEliason2 @rileyleague Related work posted last week: Price competition within government procurement can exacerbate fraud by selecting on low-cost, fraudulent firms, with new evidence from Medicare durable medical equipment nber.org/papers/w34802

Reminds me of @ryanmcdevitt, @jetson_econ, @PaulEliason2, @rileyleague, and Jimmy Roberts study of fraudulent “ambulance taxis” in Medicare. For a number of reasons, fraud is probably much more prevalent in Medicaid than Medicare but is more difficult to systematically measure.

With a PR of 3:54.56 in the mile, Brendan Herger has the No. 3 time on the program performers list! #GoBlue〽️

Price competition within government procurement can exacerbate fraud by selecting on low-cost, fraudulent firms, with new evidence from Medicare durable medical equipment, from Renuka M. Diwan, Paul J. Eliason, @rileyleague, @jetson_econ, @ryanmcdevitt, and James W. Roberts nber.org/papers/w34802

Out today! My book "AI Economics: How Technology Transforms Jobs, Markets, Life, & Our Future." Watch the preview here: youtu.be/H1OY2Bpt5Ew Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0GK4ZSD54 #AI #Economics

With a PR of 3:55.80 in the mile run, Brendan Herger has the No. 5 time on the program performers list! #GoBlue〽️

🚨New paper in @amjtransplant🚨 with @jackie_henson, @ryanmcdevitt, and the amazing team at Duke University School of Medicine More patients in need of a liver transplant are being skipped on the waiting list. The share of deceased-donor livers allocated out of sequence (AOOS) rose from 5% in 2019 to 18% in 2024. These deviations also happened earlier—the median AOOS started around 21.5 hours after the allocation process began in 2019, versus 14.9 hours in 2024, with the majority starting before donor clamp time. Meanwhile, rising AOOS use is not associated with higher donor yield. More here: amjtransplant.org/article/S1600-…

Our full study is here: jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-…

Research led by PhD student @xuyang_xia and coauthored with @PaulEliason2 @rileyleague et al. cited by @SenBlumenthal in his letter to FTC regarding abusive practices of dialysis duopoly: blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press…

@J2dubyas @YdeEric @UVAEcon What a great paper!