Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a new paper published this week in Clinical Nutrition with co-authors Kyi-Sin Than, Khounish Sharma, Kirk W. Kerr, and Dhanasekhar Kesavelu. The abstract is below: IntroductionPediatric malnutrition is a significant global public health challenge, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This study quantifies the lifetime, per-person economic impact of pediatric…
I am traveling to Panamá this Friday. Here are some interesting facts about the country’s health care system. Life expectancy is better than the U.S. Life expectancy in Panamá is 79.59 compared to 79.30 in the U.S. Mix of public and private health insurance. Panama’s healthcare architecture rests on two distinct public pillars. The Caja de…
Role of health care in the 2026 election. Where does economics fall in terms of study reproducibility? COVID-19’s “cicada” variant is spreading Best practices for transparent reporting for group based trajectory models. What is “learned helplessness”?
It is not bringing down US prices, but delaying launches in Europe. Reuters reports: Drug launches in EU markets fell by some 35% in the 10 months since Trump’s executive order, compared with the previous 10 months…Delaying launches at lower EU prices could help secure higher U.S. prices for longer. You can read the full…
An NBER working paper by Barwick, Xia and Xia (2026) provides the answer: In 2010, China accounted for less than 8% of global clinical trials; by 2020, it had surpassed the US in annual registered clinical trial volume…We provide strong evidence that China’s rise was primarily driven by the National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) reform,…
From Lex Fridman’s interview with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA: …the first job that computer scientists said, AI researchers said was gonna go away was radiology because computer vision was going to achieve superhuman levels…and it did. Computer vision was superhuman in 2019….maybe a little bit later, 2020. And so it’s been a long time…
Let’s look at some data on mean annual physician income in the U.S. compared to other countries: U.S.: $458,100 Canada: $194,700 Netherlands: $185,700 Sweden: $115,200 Why are U.S. physician incomes so much higher than other developed countries? Is it a good idea to try to drive down physician incomes? An NBER working paper by Buehler…
From a Mark et al. (2026) paper published in Health Affairs last week: …from 2000 through 2021, mental health and SUD nominal spending grew from $40.9 billion to $139.6 billion. Mental health and SUD accounted for 4.5 percent of all medical services spending in 2000 and 5.5 percent in 2021. Real per capita mental health and SUD spending grew…
That is the title of a paper published today with co-authors Arundati Nagendra (from the Schizophrenia and Psychosis Action Alliance), Raquelle Mesholam-Gately and Matcheri Keshavan (both at the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School). The abstract is here: Background Schizophrenia is traditionally classified as a serious mental illness (SMI), emphasizing chronicity and disability. However,…
Healthcare Economist was once again named one of the top economics blogs (#37) by FeedSpot. What other blogs were in the top 100? Check out the full list here. I was also ranked as one of the top economic blogs of 2026 by the Intelligent Economist as well.