Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Last week, my Healthcare Economist blog celebrated its 15th year of existence. I started this blog in graduate school at UC-San Diego in January of 2016 with the very original inaugural post titled “Welcome!“. Since then, I’ve written more than 4,600 posts on various topics of in health and economics. Some of the most popular…
Faster drug access in the Netherlands (Drug Access Protocol) “Hospitals might annually exploit extra reimbursements of about 8%–10% from primary diagnosis manipulations” Comparison of costs and benefits of European country COVID-19 responses Health Affairs’ priorities for Biden. Fauci on Trump.
What insurance is better: private commercial health insurance or public health insurance? This is a more difficult question than it seems since individuals with commercial vs. public health insurance differ over a number of dimensions which affect health care spending, quality and outcomes. To try and get at this question, a paper by Allen et…
Perhaps your friend–let’s call him Karl–thinks that a single payer system is the best health care system. Perhaps another friend–let’s call him Friedrich–disagrees and believe more free market systems work better. Karl thinks that Friedrich doesn’t care about poor people. Friedrich think your friend is naive in believing that the government would do a good…
Who should get the COVID-19 vaccine first? Since I am an economist, let’s try to figure this out mathematically. Let’s give each person or group of people a score or ranking and vaccinate each individual in priority. One key factor, is that we should the vaccine to the people most at risk for the disease.…
On the eve of Martin Luther King Day, let us take a quick look at the impact of COVID-19 by race/ethnicity. CDC reports rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. One can see that cases are higher for most minorities (except Asians) relative to Non-Hispanic Whites, but hospitalizations and deaths are much higher for all…
Health systems have been touted by some to be a cure to many of our health care systems ills by providing integrated, high quality care. Others claim that health systems are just a way for providers to big up prices through more bargaining power. Either way, it is not entirely clear to what extent health…
Pharmacy desserts. Why Israel leads in COVID vaccinations (speculative). Does temperature screening really work? A mRNA vaccine for multiple sclerosis? Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs.
Last year, I published a paper that showed that cancer mortality rates fell by 24% between 2000 and 2016 and further that new cancer drugs accounted for saving 1.3 million lives in the US over that time period. At the end of the paper, we noted that these numbers may be conservative since the use…
We know that COVID-19 has increased both mortality and morbidity around the world. But is there a systematic way of estimating the impact of COVID-19 on both mortality and morbidity. A paper by Briggs et al. (2021) proposes one simple solution. They start by creating standard life tables. Life tables are created by estimating the…