Links
COVID US death projections >200,000 by fall Half of Americans delay medical care due to pandemic. COVID impact on Workers Comp Membranes. Sports slowly returning.
All stocks are vaccine stocks
In a world with COVID-19, what factors are most influential to a company’s stock price? Are company specific or macroeconomic factors most important? It turns out, the speed of health care innovation in fighting COVID-19 may be the biggest single factor influencing all stock market prices. Barrons: General Electric stock was racing higher Tuesday, but…
Augmented inverse propensity weighted (AIPW) estimator
Let’s say you want to measure the causal impact of a specific treatment on patient outcomes from real-world data. Many statistical approaches discuss the appropriate way to estimate this causal effect assuming you know the true data generating function. In practice, however, which variables to include in any regression model may be unclear. One approach…
Are COVID-19 tests free?
The answer should be ‘yes’. From an economist’s perspective, prices for goods and services should generally be set at marginal cost unless there are externalities. In the case of COVID-19, there are clear externalities. By finding out that someone is COVID-19 positive, one could not only treat the patient (not an externality) but also the…
Links
The price of life. Increased CAR-T reimbursement. Wal-mart pays nearly $1b in associate bonuses. COVID: Fewer traffic accidents→ fewer available organs. Health insurance premium rebates?
More evidence that social distancing works
Kapoor et al. (2020) uses rainfall on last weekend before the stay-at-home order as an instrument for social distancing. variables. They find that social distancing works and has persistent effects, especially early on: We test whether earlier social distancing affects the progression of a local COVID-19 outbreak. We exploit county-level rainfall on the last weekend…
Economic burden of the Ebola epidemic larger than previously estimated
A very timely paper by my PRECISIONheor colleague Caroline Huber on the economic burden of Ebola in West Africa in 2014: Current estimates of the economic burden of the [2014 West Africa Ebola virus disease (EVD)] outbreak range from $2.8 to $32.6 billion in lost gross domestic product. We estimated the comprehensive economic and social…
ISPOR 2020 Panel: Will APMs incentivize high-value medications?
Tomorrow, Monday, May 18, I will be moderating a panel with Dr. Bapu Jena of Harvard University, Elizabeth Oyekan of PRECISIONvalue and Michael Barr of National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). The topic is: WILL ALTERNATIVE PAYMENT MODELS INCENTIVIZE HEALTH SYSTEMS TO PRESCRIBE HIGH VALUE MEDICATIONS AND SUPPORT BETTER CLINICAL OUTCOMES? ISSUE:Recent decades have seen…
Links
Inequality of opportunity. Digital comes to HCV treatment. If a vaccine is discovered, can we manufacture it at scale? Insurers are enjoying record profits. Another coronavirus casualty: California’s budget