Halloween HWR
Joe Paduda has posted Halloween Health Wonk Review! at Managed Care Matters. The meme-filled post is a blast, so go check it out!
Month: October 2018
Economics of mental health
Pharmafile has an interesting article on the “Economics of Mental Health”. The article has a number of interesting statistics: The cost: “Mental health issues have been estimated to cost the world economy $2.5 trillion each year. To put that into perspective, the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP) was $2.6 trillion in 2017.” Costs extend…
Do we need Hospital Compare if we have Yelp?
This is basically the question that Perez and Freedman (2018) ask. They find the following: Among crowdsourcing sites’ best‐ranked hospitals, 50–60% were also the best ranked on [Hospital Compare’s] HC’s overall and patient experience ratings; 20% ranked as the worst. Best‐ranked hospitals had significantly better clinical quality scores than worst ranked hospitals, but were not…
Decisions under ambiguity
In health care, decisions are always made with imperfect information. How ambiguity affects stakeholder decisionmaking and in particular how ambiguity interacts with risk preferences to affect decisions is unknown. A paper by Attema, Bleichrodt and L’Haridon (2018) aims to answer this question using a general ambiguity model. They find that: For health gains, ambiguity preferences…
Links
Uber ambulences? The impact of the sunshine act. Aging is not as bad as we think. Nurse complaint from 1898 that rings true today. Pre-existing conditions fact check.
Estimating the price elasticity of demand through value-based formulary designs
In 2010, Premera Blue Cross (Premera), a large nonprofit health plan in the Pacific Northwest implemented a value-based formulary design for its beneficiaries. In essence, enrollees could purchase high-value treatments for low copayments and low-value treatments for higher copayments. Can we use this change from more standard to value-base formulary designs to estimate the price elasticity…
Medical innovation improves not just health but labor market outcomes
An interesting study from Garthwaite 2012 examines the removal of Cox-2 inhibitors. Rather than measuring the direct effect of Cox-2 inhibitors on quality of life or health status, Garthwaite examines how this removal affected labor market outcomes. Despite dramatic improvements in medical technology, little attention has been paid to the role of these innovations in…
2018 Economics Nobel goes to Nordhaus and Romer
The Nobel Prize in Economics (formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer. For Romer, the Nobel Prize committee cited his work on endogenous growth theory, that models “how economic decisions and market conditions determine the creation of new technologies. Paul Romer solved…
What is adverse selection? Incorporating endogenous contracting
Many of my readers will know what adverse selection is, but to reiterate, adverse selection occurs in health insurance markets when sicker patients decide to choose specific types of plans. If a health insurer believes they will have a representative sample of enrollees but instead they have a disproportionate share of sick individuals, they will…
MacArthur “Genius” Fellows announced
This year’s MacArthur “Genius” Fellows were announced today. While there is a great diversity of amazing individuals receiving the grants, I will focus on those related to the health care space: Amy Finkelstein: health economist, at MIT, who is formulating robust experimental designs that provide data-driven guidance for innovations in health care theory, policy, and delivery…