Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
As reported in NPR: A federal judge in Texas issued a ruling Friday declaring the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, apparently setting the stage for another hearing on the health care law by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor invalidates what’s commonly referred to as Obamacare nationwide, and casts into…
This week, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released a document titled Evidence standards framework for digital health technologies. An accompanying piece in The Lancet by Greaves et al. (2018) aims to describe the goals of the document at a high level. The authors state that key…
A number of states have re-insurance programs to support the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) marketplaces in the individual and small group markets. Re-insurance occurs when the state offers to pay a percentage of patient costs if they exceed some threshold. This may lead you to ask a number of reasonable questions. For instance: Why…
Access to physician services and pharmaceuticals is vital–particularly among patients with serious mental illness–to insure patients receive the care they need. However, the likelihood patients receive this care depends on where they live. A paper by Manchester (2018) examines a cohort of patients eligible for both Medicare and U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and…
What costs the U.S. $197.3 billion? Slow death of rebates? How robust is propensity score matching? Trump and fetal tissue research. N.Y. Times: “Balancing prices and access to drugs for the patients of today with the innovation that will benefit those of tomorrow will take ingenuity, as well as a lot of political will.”
Would you trust the judgment of a machine or a physician? That is a pretty simple question. A seminal paper by Dawes, Faust and Meehl (1989) claim that you should trust the machine. The compare statistical or actuarial methods that are not based on human judgement against physician’s own decisions. In reviewing the literature, they…
That finding is according to an article [Martin et al. 2018] by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Office of the Actuary’s (OACT). Total nominal US health care spending increased 3.9 percent to $3.5 trillion in 2017, slowing from growth of 4.8 percent in 2016..Slower growth in health care spending in 2017 was mainly attributable to…
Health Affairs December 2018 issue focuses on telehealth. The general assumption is that telehealth is an unambiguous good. Getting access to health care providers–particularly those who live in remote areas or have transportation challenges–is certainly a good thing. But could telehealth increase the price of health care? In this thought exercise, pretend for a moment that…
We all know that there are two types of statistics: frequentist and Bayesian. Frequentist approaches treat parameters to be estimated as fixed quantities and the data we observe to come from a data generating process based on these quantities. The Bayesian approach assumes that we don’t want to just estimate the parameters as fixed points…
Many people think that once a treatment is approved, your insurance automatically covers the treatment. However, that is no longer the case. Some health plans may keep certain drugs off of formularies. Others health plans have drugs on formulary but may require step edits (failing another drug first before moving to the novel treatment) and…