Weekend Links
Does more hospital competition help or hurt patient health? Is The Matrix real? Economists at Amazon. Apple Watch pulse warnings “fairly accurate” Medicare for all = impossible dream?
Month: March 2019
What are rebates and why should we care?
A common refrain is that drug prices are too high. The question is, which price? List prices–i.e., the sticker price–almost no one pays. Patient copayments are set by health plan generosity and often are loosely correlated with the price a health plan pays. Any what does the health plan pay? To simplify, health plans pay…
Meth overdoses on the rise
In the news, deaths from overdoses of opioids, heroin and fentanyl have been in the spotlight. Rightly so. Opioid deaths in the U.S have risen to almost 50,000 people in 2017, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. However, deaths from methamphetamines is on the rise as well. In fact, many individuals who die…
Learning-by-doing in cancer surgery
Physician quality is often regarded by researhers as an immutable trait. There are high-quality physicians and low-quality physicians. In most areas where technical skill is required, however, practice makes perfect. A key question is, does ‘practice-makes-perfect’ (aka learning-by-doing) occur for physicians as well? A key challenge when doing this research is knowing the direction of…
Weekend Links
Can digital health apps save the NHS millions? Allow more opioids? Why are subway construction costs so high in the U.S? R is the future. Are ACA plans getting too expensive: …in almost all of Nebraska, a 60-year-old with a $50,000 income would pay between 30 percent and 50 percent of that income in premiums…
Facts to know in the ‘Medicare for All’ debate
Proposed by Bernie Sanders and supported by a number of politicians on the left, Medicare for All (M4A) would provide all Americans access to government health insurance. Some proposals would even replace all current insurance with a government run program. So what do you need to know about this program? The Healthcare Economist gives some…
Evidence-based medicine and the man with an elephant nose
As an economist, I typically measure treatment value based on clinical trials, real-world data and other sources. However, sometimes medicine is more an art than a science. Consider the cases reported in the Early Modern Medicine blog of the man with the elephant nose: In sixteenth-century Leuven, a troubled man sent for a physician to…
What Do Value Assessments Miss?
To find out the answer to this question, check out a live webinar on Wednesday, March 13th at 1:30pm EDT led by Dr. Anupam Jena, MD, PhD. Dr. Jena is a Harvard Professor and Precision Health Economics Scientific Advisor. In this unique one-hour webinar, Dr. Jena will outline a broader framework for assessing value to improve identification of not…
How does the CEA plan to improve health insurance markets
According to a February 2019 report, the Council of Economic Advisors proposes to improve health insurance markets through three key policies: Eliminate the individual mandate Permitting more small businesses to form Association Health Plans Expanding short-term, limited-duration insurance (STLDI) plans The report claims that these changes will generate $450 billion in social surplus over the…
Friday Links
FHIR. Measuring trust in physicians. Neighborhood effects on BMI. Dentists earn monopoly rents? Does having kids make you happy? “Sell it all.”