Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The U.S. has a gun problem. A paper by Goldstick et al. (2019) use data from the CDC’s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) tool and find that: Rates of firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional deaths in the US are 25.2, 8.0, and 6.2 times higher, respectively, than rates in other developed countries… There…
…Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. The announcement on the 2019 Economics award on the Nobel website: This year’s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. In brief, it involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions – for example, the most effective interventions for…
Capitalism is imperfect. Yet is it the best system developed to allocate scarce resources across society. However, capitalism only works if people are moral beings. For instance, if you sell a treatment and promised benefits are never realized or–even worse–the treatment is harmful, this is a problem. Typical capitalistic responses to this issue are that:…
What is Civica Rx? NPC on ICER’s revised value framework. Trebek and cancer. Rx for abstinence? Changing health policy landscape on pharmaceutical pricing.
If you are hurt and can’t work to make money, what do you do? In most countries, disabled individuals are eligible for disability insurance. However, the rate of individuals who claim disability insurance varies greatly across countries. Is this largely due to differences in country population characteristics or disability policy generosity? This is the question…
If you had a life-threatening disease and were offered a choice of treatments, would you opt for a one-time cure or for weekly treatments for the rest of your life? The answer for most people is unsurprising: a cure. Cures eliminate the inconvenience of ongoing treatment, decrease caregiver burden, and reduce patient anxiety. Although we…
Over at the Academic Health Economists’ (AHE) blog, I host this week’s journal round-up. The papers I cover include: Combined impact of future trends on healthcare utilisation of older people: a Delphi study. Health Policy [PubMed] [RePEc] Published October 2019 The fold-in, fold-out design for DCE choice tasks: application to burden of disease. Medical Decision Making…
The right to know. NPs vs. MDs. The cause of vaping lung damage. Hospitals getting into the housing business?“…of the 26 occupations…identified as ‘highly offshorable’ …15 have added jobs over the past decade and 11 have cut them.” Wellness doesn’t work.
Are narrow networks a good thing? On the one hand, they may be able to reduce health insurance premiums if insurers can negotiate lower prices. On the other hand, narrow networks means less choice of providers for patients. An less well-understood question is how narrow networks affect health care costs and utilization. Empirically, broader networks…
Let’s say I ask you–on a scale from 0 to 1–what your utility would be if you had cancer. This is a difficult question for most people to answer not only because many people will not have cancer and will not know what it is actually like, but also the concept of “utility” is not…