Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Healthcare Economist will be off through Labor Day, taking a vacation to San Diego. Inspired by this trip, below is a study that finds that people who take vacations are healthier. Although not a randomized trial, this evidence is suggestive. The Huffington Post paraphrases: In a study of 13,000 middle-aged men at risk for heart disease, those who…
Workers’ Comp trends. LA storeys. Who ordered that? P4P skepticism. This paper is about nothing.
Why don’t payers adopt innovative approaches to treat mental illness? For instance, crisis intervention programs, recovery-focused consumer education programs, telehealth programs, and on-line treatment programs have sometimes have had problems receiving reimbursement from payers. Monica Oss of OpenMinds takes the payers’ perspective: Often, the organization proposing the new program comes to the table with an…
How important is a name? In the case of biologics and biosimilars, billions of dollars depends on whether biosimilars can share the same name as branded biologics. WonkBlog explains the biologic vs. biosimilar debate: Biologics, which treat serious diseases like cancer and multiple sclerosis, are usually more expensive than conventional drugs, and they’re also harder to…
Do voters now like Obamacare? The deadliest drug. Evidence for digital medicine. X-ray goggles. CDC Ebola guidance.
Austin Frakt says although Medicare Advantage plans used to be considered high cost, low-quality options, in recent years, these Medicare Advantage plans have vastly increased quality of care and have become less focused on cream-skimming healthier patients. Medicare Advantage plans — private plans that serve as alternatives to the traditional, public program for those…
Paul Dzielinski of The DEC page makes his CavRisk debut with an excellent round-up of interesting posts, and his own helpful insights on each one.
Health Economists often use the cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) metric to answer this question. QALYs are used to measure not only the additional years of life from a treatment, but also the quality of life. For instance, you may prefer to live 1 year in perfect health to two years in a coma.…
Conventional wisdom holds that individuals with serious mental illenesses will have more difficulty acquiring and retaining a job. Measuring the magnitude of the effect of any mental illness on employment empirically is difficult because of a dual-causality problem. People with mental illnesses may have difficulty gaining employment, but losing employment also has an adverse effect on…
FDA and device regulation. Ebola cards. Drugs and workers comp. Mentorship vs. MOOC. Automate vs. Innovate.