Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Kaiser Family Foundation describes how Obamacare will affect your health insurance coverage in a simple cartoon featuring the “YouToons”. Vastly simplified, and a bit slanted towards a positive view of the legislation, but overall a good summary to health wonk novices of how the Affordable Care Act will affect your health insurance options and…
Louise Norris has posted an excellent “Midsummer Wonk’s Dream” edition of Health Wonk Review at Colorado Health Insurance Insider.
In the standard statistics case, when you compare two continuous variables, you can use a t-test to determine equality of means. For instance, you may want to know if LeBron James scores more points on average than Kevin Durant. However, what if you want to instead compare two categorical variables. For instance, assume you are…
What options are available for propensity score matching algorithms? Baser (2006) describes a number of popular options. Stratified Matching. In this method, the range of variation of the propensity score is divided into intervals such that within each interval, treated and control units have, on average, the same propensity score. Differences in outcome measures between…
The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. However, you may be surprised at the frequency with which doctors make mistakes according to a recent article in JAMA. The study reports that more than 2 in 5 patients receives at least one misdiagnosis. In 190 cases, a total of 68 unique diagnoses were missed. Most missed diagnoses were…
30 Day Readmission Rates. ORYX and Inpatient Quality Measures. Jews and Economics. Higher coinsurance rates decrease adherence. Any progress on hospital EHR adoption?
In the past, I have written about how Medicare pays for Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF). Medicare uses a case-mix adjusted per diem rate. This approach, however, isn’t the only manner payers can use to reimburse nursing facilities. Consider how Australia pays for nursing care under their Australian National Sub-Acute and Non-Acute Patient Classification System (AN-SNAP):…
Bob Wilson of Workers Compensation makes his CavRisk hosting debut with a knockout effort, featuring risk-releated posts on “hunger, health care, health care delayed, obesity and everything in between.”
What is Berkson’s paradox? Assume that there are two independent events, A and B. These events are not correlated when observed in nature. However, what if one conditions on the fact that either A or B occurs. By conditioning on the fact that one of the two events occurred, these events are now correlated. If…
When a problem appears, politicians often call for more regulation. Wall Street collapses? Frank-Dodd. Health insurance doesn’t cover pre-existing conditions? PPACA. Need to protect patient privacy? HIPAA. But are there downsides to increased regulation? A paper by Cotet and Benjamin (2013) examines just this question. In particular, they examine the welfare implications of regulations that…