Friday Links
Being transgender and finding a doctor. Do you accurately perceive your risk of death? Performance-based financing in Cambodia. The cost of obesity in China. 5.25 seconds.
Month: July 2015
ACC/AHA Statement on Measuring Treatment Value
The conventional premise governing performance measures and guideline recommendation…is that all healthcare professionals should act in the best interests of their patients without regard to costs. However, as the cost of medical care has increased, specialty societies are increasing considering the cost of care when selecting treatments. For instance, A recent survey reported that slightly…
Is Medicare no longer a budget buster?
Not entirely, but the 2015 Medicare Trustees report is certainly more optimistic than in the past. Brookings reports: The Trustees have dramatically lowered their projections of long-run Medicare expenditure growth. In 2009, for example, the Trustees projected that Medicare spending would reach 11.2 percent of GDP by 2080—compared with just 6 percent in this year’s…
Does your employer cover transgender benefits?
It may be more likely than you think. The Health Business Blog (via Business Insurance) notes that: …the Office of Personnel Management recently required Federal Employee Benefit Plan providers to cover transition-related care…About half of large employers offer transgender-related surgical coverage compared with 5 percent in 2007, according to a National Business Group on Health survey.…
Friday Links
Paying for primary care. Is marijuana ‘medical’? Why rent control is bad. Minimum wage. Health insurance and cable.
Basket vs. Umbrella clinical trials
How do you determine if a drug is effective? Typically, biostaticians rely on a randomized control trial where half the patients receive the treatment of interest and the remaining half receive either a placebo or the current standard of care depending on the trial design. Recent advances in cancer, however, call for more sophisticated designs. Some cancer treatments are only…
International Reference Pricing
What is international reference pricing (IRP)? IRP is system whereby a country states that they will pay no more than the price paid by another country or a basket of countries. In theory, countries could also regulate drug prices by saying that they would not pay more than X% of country A’s price or X%…
Quotation of the Day
The human mind is generally far more eater to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a…
Half a trillion dollars
Clearly, the care family members provide for sick relatives add significant value to the life of the infirm. Many non-economists may consider the cost of this care as “free” because family members typically are not paid for this services. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If family members were not caring for their…
Links
How to push a wheelchair. Rocket failures. How to Win Friends and Influence Doctors. No more snacks? Oliver on stadiums