Friday Links
Vox’s best stories of 2017. What is the value of treating blindness? Workers’ comp is shrinking. Is Taiwan a model for the U.S. Are changes to the Orphan Drug Act coming?
Month: December 2017
Top Health Economics Stories of 2017
What were the top stories at the intersection of health and economics stories in 2017? Here is the Healthcare Economist’s take. Obamacare repeal. One of the top stories clearly must be the on-going debate around the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare). Although the ACA was not fully repealed, the most recent Republican…
What happens to CHIP?
The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is a federal program that provides matching funds to states in order for them to provide health insurance to children. The program was designed to cover uninsured children in families with incomes that are modest but too high to qualify for Medicaid. Currently, however, the program is in jeopardy. In fact, federal funding for…
Friday Links
An open-source approach to value assessment Economic freedom in North America. Cyberbullying and suicide. Why are we moving away from academic medical centers to academic health systems? Reform within state employee health plans
Why fighting disease is hard
Without a doubt, medicine has made tremendous gains over the last decades and even more progress when viewed across centuries. Often to treat diseases, physicians and researchers identify a single or primary pathway that is causing the disease. Maybe there is a gene mutation which causes an abnormality. Maybe there is a bacteria or virus…
How is Washington State using evidence-based medicine?
A paper by Rothman et al. (2017) explains what goes on at the Washington Health Technology Assessment Program’s (WHTAP), the first state-administered health technology assessment (HTA) program in the U.S.: Over the past 9 years, Washington State has been pursuing an innovative and generally effective program to use evidence-based medicine to determine state health care…
The Big Five
UnitedHealthcare, Anthem, Aetna, Cigna and Humana are the five largest health insurers in America. To learn more about them, check out a recent paper by Schoen and Collins (2017) in Health Affairs. The five largest US commercial health insurance companies together enroll 125 million members, or 43 percent of the country’s insured population…In 2016 Medicare and Medicaid…
Friday Links
The cost-effectiveness of CAR-T. Cancer gene testing breakthrough. Uninsured vs. Insured: ER use. Doulas for death. What’s the problem with digital DNA? Plus, please check out the Happy Holiday Health Wonk Review at Workers’ Comp Insider.
Does the value-modifier improve quality and reduce health disparities?
In short, no. That is the answer Roberts, Zaslavsky and McWilliams reach in their 2017 paper in Annals. Some background on the value modifier program. In 2013, practices with 100 or more eligible clinicians were rewarded just from reporting quality measures. By 2014, however: Practices with 100 or more clinicians were subject to upward, downward,…
How one project will change the way value is measured in healthcare
That is the title of a recent article in Managed Healthcare Executive on the Innovation and Value Initiative’s new Open-Source Value Project. The magazine interviewed Mark Linthicum, IVI’s Director of Scientific Communication. An excerpt is below: Linthicum: Many healthcare stakeholders are now being asked to make decisions based on value, but few are also given…