Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Most health care scholars–whether they are scientists, doctors or economists–believe that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the best means by which one can test whether or not a drug is efficacious. Despite its high cost, RCTs are able to abstract from confounding factors by randomly assigning similar patients to both a treatment and a placebo-controlled…
What issues are facing primary care physicians in the near future? A nice article by Eugene Rich and Anna Maio discusses just this topic in their paper “Late to the Feast: Primary Care and US Health Policy.” Some issues discussed are: How FFS payment systems compare to prepaid-group practice with regards to the type of…
The Times of London reports (“…no surgery until you quit“) that smokers who needed surgery “…would not be added to waiting lists until they had given up smoking.” While there is vast medical evidence that shows the hazards of smoking as well as the fact that smoking reduces recovery time from surgery, should we really…
Below is an abstract of a working paper I am writing with Dr. John Fontanesi and two other co-authors at the CDC. The complete paper is available on my website. Influenza is the 7th leading killer in the United States. In order an attempt to attenuate the threat of an influenza outbreak, the Centers for…
Everyone has heard of the Asian Tigers. The countries of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan are four countries who have experienced significant economic growth over recent decades. Due to the meteoric rise in the economic indicators in these countries, many economists have named them the Asian Tigers. But what about the African Leopards? …