Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
If you want the best health care articles on the web, then you came to the right place. This week the Healthcare Economist is hosting the world-renowned Health Wonk Review. I’ve divided the articles into 6 categories: health insurance, mental health, pharmaceuticals, physician pay, regulation, and value measurement. No fancy themes, just high-quality content. Without further ado,…
Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, has a list of mental models that he believes “come up repeatedly in day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking.” Many are from the world of economics, but I focus on non-economic models as well. I organzie them into categories based on how Weinberg did in his post. I have…
The Congressional Budget Office provides some gloomy news on the fiscal health of the federal government in their recent 2016 Long Term Budget Outlook. They state: If current laws governing taxes and spending did not change, the United States would face steadily increasing federal budget deficits and debt over the next 30 years, according to projections…
CMS announced last week that they are extending their value-based insurance design (VBID) program to more states and more patients. I describe VBID and the proposed changes below. What is VBID? Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID) generally refers to health insurers’ efforts to structure enrollee cost sharing and other health plan design elements to encourage enrollees…
Google partners with GSK to form biotech firm. You are 6x more likely to be killed by the police in the US than in Canada. ICER myths? One area without racial disparities? 2 million Medicare beneficiaries are homebound. How will they get the medical care they need?
It appear that most of the gains in longevity and reductions in disability among elderly Americans accrued to Caucasians. Using data from the 1982 and 2004 National Long Term Care Surveys and the 2011 National Health and Aging Trends Study, Freedman and Spillman (2016) find the following: We examine changes in active life expectancy in…
Common decency counts. Showing up on time and giving respect is key when you’re the CEO. Bob Lefsetz in “Yahoo Lessons” at The Big Picture
AJMC has a nice article summarizing some of the key differences between the two presidential candidates. I paraphrase the article below. The future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Clinton wants to keep or even expand the ACA and wants to cap out-of-pocket drug costs. Clinton has even called for a public option. On the…
Accountable Care Organizations aim to link providers through the supply chain (i.e., hospitals, physicians, post-acute care facilities) to incentivize providers to improve quality and reduce costs. In addition to its ACO program (the Medicare Shared Savings Program), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have implemented a number of value-based payment programs, including the…
That is the abbreviated title of a new commentary on the Forbes blog that I wrote with Tomas Philipson. The full article is HERE. An excerpt is below. New value frameworks in health care have emerged due to increasing cost pressures. Although value frameworks can be useful tools, they should be used to complement the…