Trends in Health Care Spending

A recent Health Affairs article by Cynthia Smith, Cathy Cowan, Stephen Heffler and Aaron Catlin details the trends in health care spending over the last 25 years. I have compiled their results into a handy graph. In addition the the general overall increase, there are other significant findings. Between 1970 and 2004, out-of-pocket payments decreased…

“Going into Labor: Earnings vs. Infant Survival in Rural Africa” – Elsa V. Artadi

Today I attended a seminar where Elsa Artadi presented her paper on: “Going into Labor: Earnings vs. Infant Survival in Rural Africa.” Artadi asked the question ‘why do families not optimize childbearing to coincide with months of minimal infant mortality?’ Artadi demonstrated that infant mortality rates vary significantly from month to month in Sub-Saharan Africa…

Money Trail May Mark Path of New Pandemics

A recent article in Nature (“The Scaling Laws of Human Travel“) claims that the flow of money may provide a good model of how diseases spread in modern society. Previous models of how pandemics generally thought that the dispersion would occur slowly over a contiguous geographic region. As air travel becomes more and more common…

“Health Care Tax Policy” paper by Health Care Economist

In the United States today, many employees receive compensation in the form of health insurance in addition to pecuniary remuneration. Health insurance, however, is tax deductible when it is received from an individual’s employer while wages are not. A Health Affairs report shows that this tax expenditure from excluding health insurance from the federal income…