Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
According to Hamersma and Matthew Kim (2013), the answer is no. The authors use data from the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This data is supplemented with state-level information on Medicaid income eligibility rules. The authors classify each person as either: holding no insurance, private insurance,…
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Jaan Sidorov’s Disease Management Care Blog.
How accurate is your health insurance quote? The robot will see you now. Good work is not enough. SSW vs. SSB. Disease-based price indexes
One of the reasons is that health-related academic research is often wrong. Biostatisticians have studied the question of just how frequently published studies come up with wrong answers. A highly regarded researcher in this subfield of medical wrongness is John Ioannidis, who heads the Stanford Prevention Research Center, among other appointments. Using several different…
The answer is ‘no.’ For instance, consider the case where breast cancer screening is subsidized, but you are uninsured an breast cancer treatment is unaffordable. What is the value of breast cancer screening? It is probably pretty low since if you find out you have breast cancer, there is not much you can do about…
Although I am not an expert on current methods used to evaluate options for teaching children, Richard Feynman does a good job of explaining why education successes are often difficult to generalize to a broader population. …take education. Some guy comes along and he sees the way people teach mathematics and he says, “I…
Many research questions require healthcare economists to measure the effect of various patient, physician or market-level characteristics on specific health events. Oftentimes, these events are discrete in nature. For instance, doctor’s visits, ER visits, and hospitalizations are all discrete events. To properly estimate the effect of certain characteristics on a discrete event, count models are needed. The…
The 177th edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is hosted by Anisha Sekar of Nerd Wallet. This edition of the CoR is focused on the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare). Check it out.
Over 10 million Americans need long-term services and supports to assist them in life’s daily activities. Of these, 1.6 million reside in a nursing home. Nursing home care, however, is expensive ($74,800 per year) and and quality is highly variable. To improve the quality of care, many states have begun adopting pay-for-performance (P4P) programs for nursing homes. Between…
Although many people believe that the U.S. healthcare system is a free-market, that is far from the case. Consider nursing homes. Two-thirds of patient spending on nursing home care comes from public sources. Not only do public funds pay for the variable cost of running nursing homes, but the federal government also provides low-interest…