Friday Links

Hooters and Healthcare. Will Increased Longevity Bring Down Medicare? Effect of your neighborhood on your happiness. Kickbacks are alive and well. Routine HIV Testing on the way? Healthcare slowdown: Can it continue? Who decides access to drugs: FDA or the courts? Free National Medicaid Drug Database.

Is my distribution normal?

How can you tell if you have a normal distribution?  For instance, assume you have data on the results of a drug relative to a placebo.  You know the mean and standard deviation of the data, but that does not necessarily imply that the data is distributed in a normal fashion. How can you do…

What are we weighting for?

Weighting has a number of uses.  For instance, one can use weighting to estimate population sample statistics.  The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) for instance oversamples households with low income.  To get nationally mean values, one must reweight the PSID values, either using survey weights or matching to a nationally representative sample such as…

How Missing Data affects Physicians’ P4P Bonuses

Pay-for-performance programs often offer bonuses (or penalties) for physicians, hospitals and other providers based on the quality of care patients receive.  Measuring quality of care, however, is often difficult.  For chronic conditions, for instance, many patients eligible for outcome measures may be lost to follow-up.  This issue can potentially affect provider evaluations and bonus payments.…