Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
It appears that the answer is ‘yes’. Many studies by the Dartmouth Atlas team have shown that regions that spend more on medical care do not always get better outcomes. However, a recent paper by my Precision Health Economics colleagues James Baumgardner, Ahva Shahabi, Mark Linthicum, Seanna Vine, and Darius Lakdawalla as well as Chris Zacker…
A nice summary of the policy changes scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).
How is President Trump planning to keep his campaign promise to improve health care for Veterans? One pathways is through his VA Mission Act of 2018. As the Washington Post reports, this bill would include $55 billion in additional funding for veterans. A key part of this legislation is that it allows for more veterans…
Did the ACA constrain health care costs? Should we pay for blood? Health care in your barbershop? Do we need to move beyond traditional cost effectiveness? In what ways can machine learning surprise us?
Many health economists rely on the concept of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) to measure the value of different treatments. When comparing one treatment to another, one can summarize the health benefits based on not only the among of life that was extended (i.e., extra years lived) but also what the quality of life is. …
Typically, people focus on how severe diseases affect their health. Clearly, however, poor health also can affect people’s income as well as some disease makes holding a job difficult or impossible. Even people in good health with serious diseases may lower income if they need to miss work frequently for frequent doctor’s appointments. In fact,…
Outcomes-based contracts are supposed to be the next big thing. When payers are not sure about the real-world benefits or cost of a treatment, outcomes-based contracts and help them diversity risk. For instance, CMS will only pay for the CAR-T product Kymriah when “…these patients respond to Kymriah by the end of the first month…
For those who are attending the International Society For Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) conference this next week in Baltimore, please check out my poster titled: THE EFFECT OF MEDICATION CHOICE AFTER TUMOR NECROSIS FACTOR INHIBITOR (TNFI) USE ON THE HEALTHCARE COSTS FOR PATIENTS WITH RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS: AN INSTRUMENTAL VARIABLES APPROACH My co-authors are Ahva…
At Healthcare Economist, we talk a lot about quality metrics. What they can and cannot do. One of our gurus of health care quality measurement, Avedis Donabedian, weighed in on his thoughts on how best they should be used: “Systems awareness and systems design are important for health professionals, but they are not enough. They…
In this version of the Health Wonk Review, I find the latest greatest from around the web related to health policy. Since more an more people consume their web through photos (see Instagram’s popularity), for each post, a carefully curated picture has been selected to further entice you to read through this great selection of…