Friday Links
All praise the fist bump. Problems with U.S. coronavirus testing protocols. Health Affairs’ ACA at 10 series. Living with multiple sclerosis. Which programming language is best for economics research?
Month: February 2020
Cost of Bernie Sanders’ M4A Plan: $13 trillion
No, that is not a typo. The cost of Bernie Sanders Medicare-for-All (M4A) plan is $13 trillion dollars. How does this stack up to other candidates? The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget does the math. Whereas Mr. Sanders plan would cost $12.95 trillion between 2021 and 2030, Mrs. Warren’s plan would cost $6.1 trillion,…
COVID-19 comes to California
On the night of Donald Trump’s first major speech on the corronavirus called COVID-19, California announced the first person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 in the US. The L.A. Times reports: It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or…
Does drug decriminalization work? The Portugal case study
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized drugs. What does that mean? How did it health outcomes, incarcerations, drug trafficking and other outcomes? A post by Liam Bendicksen at Incidental Economist reviews the literature. The first thing to understand is what decriminalization in Portugal did and did not do. …drug reforms decriminalized possession up to “the quantity required…
How does Medicaid pay for pharmaceuticals?
Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice overview of how Medicaid pays for prescription drugs. Below, I except from this helpful piece, but do check out the full article here. One point that many may not realize is that State Medicaid Agencies do not actually buy pharmaceuticals directly from manufacturers. Rather, they reimburse retail pharmacies that…
Links
Does medical marijuana increase or decrease Workers’ Comp claims? Value-based contracts for a $2m drug. Tips on working with claims data. Are decision support tools turning doctors into idiots? (from 2011) Is Medicaid mediocre?
Do 2019 FDA-approved drugs reflect America’s diversity?
New drugs have the potential to not only extend patients’ lives but also change their quality of life. But are the drugs approved by the FDA reflective of the broader US population? If there were lots of drugs developed for men but not women,or whites but not blacks, health gains from new drugs would be…
It’s NOT the prices, stupid?
A famous paper by Anderson et al. (2003) attempted to explain why health care in the U.S. is so expensive. The answer: “It’s the prices, stupid.” However, is that really the case? A fascinating blog post on Random Critical Analysis disputes this piece of conventional wisdom. In the U.S., prices certainly have risen. However, they…
Introduction to Bayesian Statistics: Inference about genetic status
Let us say we observe a women without any symptoms for hemophilia. What are the odds she is a carrier for the disease? A few relevant points about the disease are helpful. First, hemophilia is a recessive, X-chromosome linked trait. Thus, males with hemophilia inherited the disease from their mothers via their X-chromosome and females…
Projecting the economic impact of covid-19
The Economist has an interesting series of article (here and here) on covid-19, the new WHO name of the corona virus. One key issue is how strict containment efforts should be. These decisions are being made not just based on the potential to impact the health of a country’s population but also economic and political…