Friday Links
Similarities between health care and military contracting. Career cold start algorithm. Legalize pay toilets. Case against charitable giving. Drug overdoses killed how many Americans in 2017?
Month: November 2018
Innovation and Value Initiative in the news
The Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) where I serve as the Director of Research was recently in the news with a Journal of Clinical Pathways interview with Executive Director Jennifer Bright and Director of Scientific Communications Mark Linthicum. Some excerpts: Can you tell us about the Innovation and Value Initiative? Bright: We are working in three primary areas.…
Medicare, adverse selection and cancer
Conventional wisdom holds that Medicare Advantage provides better service and lower cost sharing than traditional Medicare fee-for-service, and thus is attractive for many people. However, Medicare Advantage may restrict access to providers and may be less attractive to patients with more severe illnesses. Healthcare economists, however, do not rely on rumors and stories to make…
Come work with me at PHE
If you are interested in working with me at Precision Health Economics, please apple here. A job description is below. Associate Research Scientist – Health Policy Location: Los Angeles, California US Job Id: 1357 Los Angeles, California US Work From Home Available:No Exempt,Regular Full-time Division:Precision Value & Health Business Unit:Precision Health Economics Who we…
Discrete choice experiments
How have discrete choice experiments changed over time? This is the question Soekhai et al. (2018) try to answer. They conduct a systematic literature review covering 27 years of data. Below I summarize some of their findings graphically. First, you see a trend of an increasing number of DCEs. We also see that whereas DCEs…
Your reading list
$25.5m verdict against Aetna. “New, simpler economic models” for PBMs Cost of ageism: $63 billion. What is the FDA doing about opioids? Value-based drug pricing in Michigan’s Medicaid program. Leading health care moneymakers. HRRP works in California. Access to pharmaceuticals in China.
Can single payer systems work?
Much of the discussions of the pros and cons of single payer systems are ideological. Single payer advocates will say they are fair, potentially can leverage economies of scale, and more equitable. Single payer opponents will argue that they are inefficient, and restrict choice. An interesting paper from Tomoki Fuji (2018), shows that the answer…
Positive externalities of Medicaid expansion
From Sen and DeLeire (2018): …premiums of Marketplace plans are 11% lower in Medicaid expansion states, controlling for demographic and health characteristics as well as measures of health care access. These results are consistent with evidence on the composition of the private insurance risk pool in expansion versus nonexpansion states and associated differences in expected…
What is the difference between rate, risk and odds?
Oftentimes, you will ready a study that says, treatment A reduces the rate of something by X%, or the treatment reduces the risk by Y%, or reduces the odds by Z%. These are basically the same thing, right? That is not entirely correct. While all these concepts summarize the frequency or likelihood of something occuring…
November Health Wonk Review
Lisa Lines of The Medical Care Blog hosts this month’s edition of the Health Wonk Review. Lisa blogs from San Diego as she is attending the American Public Health Association annual meeting. The HWR edition talks about HRRP, income eligibility for the health insurance exchanges, pharmacists as providers, Medicaid expansion and many other topics. Check…