The end of Obamacare?

As reported in NPR: A federal judge in Texas issued a ruling Friday declaring the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, apparently setting the stage for another hearing on the health care law by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor invalidates what’s commonly referred to as Obamacare nationwide, and casts into…

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What costs the U.S. $197.3 billion? Slow death of rebates? How robust is propensity score matching? Trump and fetal tissue research. N.Y. Times: “Balancing prices and access to drugs for the patients of today with the innovation that will benefit those of tomorrow will take ingenuity, as well as a lot of political will.”

Is physician judgement overrated?

Would you trust the judgment of a machine or a physician?  That is a pretty simple question.  A seminal paper by Dawes, Faust and Meehl (1989) claim that you should trust the machine.  The compare statistical or actuarial methods that are not based on human judgement against physician’s own decisions. In reviewing the literature, they…

Would telehealth increase the price of health care?

Health Affairs December 2018 issue focuses on telehealth.  The general assumption is that telehealth is an unambiguous good.  Getting access to health care providers–particularly those who live in remote areas or have transportation challenges–is certainly a good thing. But could telehealth increase the price of health care? In this thought exercise, pretend for a moment that…