Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Although the high cost of pharmaceuticals is often in the news, these costs are offset by improved health benefits. However, it may not be clear the extent to which new pharmaceutical products lead to improved health at the national level. A paper by Lichtenberg (2018) aims to examine this question looking at the introduction of…
Stand-up economist Yoram Bauman, weighs on how AI will affect to productivity of jokes. Enjoy.
In one of his first acts as California Governor, Gavin Newson has proposed a way to reduce drug price: let California use its size to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical firms. As the N.Y. Times reports: [O]n Monday, Mr. Newsom signed an executive order proposing a plan that would allow California to directly negotiate with drug manufacturers. The…
Super gonorrhoea The cost of H1N1 influenza outbreaks. Do wellness programs save money? Government shutdown’s impact on healthcare “the marginal return to the tough-on-crime stance may be close to zero”
Earlier this year, I reviewed one definition of causality: the Bradford Hill criteria. Now I move from a medical definition causality to one developed by an economist (in fact, an economist from my alma matter). Granger causality basically identifies a variable as causal if: (i) it occurs the outcome of interest and (ii) including past…
An interesting article in the N.Y. Times “Upshot” section by Austin Frakt argues that federal efforts to nudge people towards healthier behaviors may be doomed to fail. A $100 billion dollar health care package…encourages exercise by treating gym memberships as tax-deductible medical expenses…[a]nd it would permit the use of flexible spending accounts and health savings accounts…
Fung et al. (2019) conclude the following based on a 2017 survey of California residents: …19 percent reported that they would not have purchased insurance had there been no penalty. We estimated that premiums would increase by 4–7 percent if these enrollees were not in the risk pool. The percentages of enrollees who would forgo…
A number of studies (e.g., Wasfy et al. 2017, Desai et al. 2016) have found that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) reduce hospital readmissions. However, are these findings valid? A recent paper by Ody et al. (2019) argues maybe not. Because readmission rates are risk-adjusted, changing coding…
According to a recent study in Health Affairs by Hernandez et al. (2019), the answer is ‘no’. The authors use pricing data from First Databank and pharmacy claims from UPMC Health Plan between 2008-2016 to track trends in drug prices over time. They found that the costs of oral brand name drugs increased 9.2% per year…
That is the topic of a recent paper by Catillon, Cutler and Getzen (2018). In 1800, life expectancy in the US was only 43 years; by 2014, this number had increased to 79 years. Using vital statistics data from the U.S. generally and specifically from the state of Massachusetts, they find the following: …there is…