Weekend links
Thoughts on IPI. Thoughts on suicide. Where is California workers’ comp headed? What’s next for FDA? Vitale: Just pay the players.
How long will you wait for cancer treatment in the UK?
How long does it take to get treated for cancer in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS)? How long does it take for ambulances to arrive? What about wait times at ED visits? An article in The Independent answers these questions with statistics from NHS itself. The answer to the above questions, about 1…
HHS recommendations to reform the health care system
HHS has a policy paper titled “Reforming America’s Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition“. In the paper, HHS describes four broad areas of reform. I describe each in term, some of the key policy recommendation under each of the four headings, and my thoughts on each reform. Here goes: Health care workforce and labor markets.…
Medicaid expansion and prescription drug use
How did Medicaid expansion affect prescription drug use? At first glance, one would think that prescriptions increased; more insurance lowers patient out-of-pocket cost so we would expect more prescriptions. Medicaid insurance may crowd out other forms of insurance; if those other forms of insurance covered more drugs, then perhaps utilization would go down. A study…
Weekend Links
Does more hospital competition help or hurt patient health? Is The Matrix real? Economists at Amazon. Apple Watch pulse warnings “fairly accurate” Medicare for all = impossible dream?
What are rebates and why should we care?
A common refrain is that drug prices are too high. The question is, which price? List prices–i.e., the sticker price–almost no one pays. Patient copayments are set by health plan generosity and often are loosely correlated with the price a health plan pays. Any what does the health plan pay? To simplify, health plans pay…
Meth overdoses on the rise
In the news, deaths from overdoses of opioids, heroin and fentanyl have been in the spotlight. Rightly so. Opioid deaths in the U.S have risen to almost 50,000 people in 2017, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. However, deaths from methamphetamines is on the rise as well. In fact, many individuals who die…
Learning-by-doing in cancer surgery
Physician quality is often regarded by researhers as an immutable trait. There are high-quality physicians and low-quality physicians. In most areas where technical skill is required, however, practice makes perfect. A key question is, does ‘practice-makes-perfect’ (aka learning-by-doing) occur for physicians as well? A key challenge when doing this research is knowing the direction of…
Weekend Links
Can digital health apps save the NHS millions? Allow more opioids? Why are subway construction costs so high in the U.S? R is the future. Are ACA plans getting too expensive: …in almost all of Nebraska, a 60-year-old with a $50,000 income would pay between 30 percent and 50 percent of that income in premiums…
Facts to know in the ‘Medicare for All’ debate
Proposed by Bernie Sanders and supported by a number of politicians on the left, Medicare for All (M4A) would provide all Americans access to government health insurance. Some proposals would even replace all current insurance with a government run program. So what do you need to know about this program? The Healthcare Economist gives some…