Date of Defense

12-4-2025

Date of Graduation

12-2025

Department

Statistics

First Advisor

Michael Ryan

Second Advisor

Rodrigo Aranda

Third Advisor

Kevin Lee

Abstract

Background 
Healthcare varies in each state from labor and capital to the laws governing the state and the finances they run under. United States citizens have criticized healthcare and call for change as the United States lacks a universal healthcare system. Even with a universal healthcare system, there are systematic issues and a financial downturn that need to be addressed even if it were to be adopted. Half of the counties in the U.S. see a shortage in labor and hospitals leading to a desert for both cases. Funding through the government is unstable and lacks clear and meaningful payments in the system they have now. Current policies do not reach what is needed for the system to work.

Objective 
To examine the issues facing the healthcare system today. Understand the obstacles preventing the American healthcare system from being great. Focusing on the Midwest and what issues are most important in those areas. While looking at these, an analysis among Midwest states will evaluate the differences that affect the expenses for these states’ hospitals while seeing if there are any differentiating factors.

Study 
Design The study measures the differences in the entire Midwest’s hospital expenses as well as individual states themselves. For the individual states, they were compared using Multiple Linear Regressions, evaluating the inputs that make the expenses different from one another. If the year was found to be a significant variable, an ARIMA (0,0,0) was used against the state to assess progression over time. For the whole Midwest, a Linear Mixed-Effects (LME) model was conducted using states as the random variable. All models were evaluated using an 5% significance level against the respective p-value.

Results
The Midwest showed a result that the effective variables were number of hospitals, per capita disposable income, and coverage by Medicaid. For the individual states, Indiana, Iowa and Michigan found that no variables were significant towards hospitals expenses. Other states mostly found the intercept of the model and year to be significant with only Wisconsin of the remaining few not finding year significant. Against all states finding year significant, no state shared the exact same combination of variables showing significance. This allowed us to conclude that with a 5% significance level, the individual states in the Midwest have a difference in their hospital expenses when compared to each other. For the Midwest, the factors found significant were number of hospitals in the state, per capita disposable income and coverage by Medicaid. We can confidently say that with a 5% significance level these variables are the significant components that affect hospital expenses when looking at the Midwest as a whole.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Open Access

Additional Files
Thesis Presentation.pdf (3175 kB)
Presentation
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