September 2018 – Page 3 – Healthcare Economist

Should we really be spending so much on end of life care?

2018-09-04Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

At first glance, spending a lot of money at the end of people’s life doesn’t make sense. From an economics perspective, the “return on investment” is less, since one may have been able to spend the same money earlier in life to prolong survival. Further, for any given treatment, these treatments are often less effective…

Pollution affects not just physical health, but also cognition

2018-09-03Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

That is according to a recent article published in PNAS by Zhang, Zhang and Chen (2018). As reported in The Economist: …chronic exposure to pollution lowered the scores on the verbal tests, and that the higher the pollution levels were the more the scores dropped. On average, an increase of 13.23 units (one standard deviation) in…