Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
As of January 30, 2020, President Trump has an overall approval rating of 42.8% according to 538. He has a disapproval rating of 52.8% leading to a net rating of -10% Yet this overall number may hide heterogeneity in what people think. Maybe public opinion of President Trump is more favorable on some issues than…
Who knows best, patients or physicians? Clearly, physicians have medical knowledge that patients do not. On the other hand, patients have their own preferences balancing treatment safety, efficacy, convenience and other factors. Further, physicians may be more familiar with older less effective treatments compared to newer more effective treatments. One interesting question is how health…
Are nurse practitioners cost-effective? Intergenerational health association. Hospitalist staffing and quality of care. The Disruptor. Health care costs on voters’ minds.
Access to care in rural areas is often a problem. Some studies have found that rural residents are less likely to seek preventive care such as vaccinations in part due to the need to travel long distances to get primary care. Even if rural residents do access their primary care physician (PCP), however, are they…
Cocaine making a comeback? Supplier-induced demand in France and Germany? Infrastructure and beer in the Congo (DRC). Do at-home braces work? Coronavirus spreads.
Let’s say you are studying patients taking Drug A for Disease X. Further assume that you want to identify predictors that a patient is adherent to Drug A. Using health insurance claims data, you define your outcome–medication adherence–as whether the patient had proportion of days covered (PDC) is greater than or equal to 80%, the…
Today, the first case of coronavirus was identified in the U.S. The man was infected when he traveled to visit relatives in the Wuhan, China. Here are some helpful FAQs. Where has the coronavirus spread? The CDC website reports: Chinese authorities first identified the new coronavirus, which has resulted in close to 300 confirmed human…
Despite what conventional wisdom says, a paper by Chen et al. (2019) indicates that the answer may be ‘yes’. The adjusted price per median LYG [life year gained] of a drug increased by $6129 (P = .14) each year from 1995 to 2012,…whereas the adjusted price per mean LYG increased at a markedly slower rate…
One popular technique for causal inference is difference-in-difference (DiD) estimation. Under DiD, there is one cohort of observations with both a pre and post intervention time period and another group that was not exposed to the intervention. The time trend of the group without an intervention in essence serves as a control group for the…
That is a claim by a recent JAMA article by Shrank et al. (2020). The Incidental Economist has a nice video explaining their findings. Of the $760 billion in total waste, the largest component is administration and billing, costing $266 billion. There is an easy way to eliminate most of this waste: eliminate insurance. If…