Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
For those interested in a global view, the World Health Organization (WHO) Situation Reports are required daily reading. Key notes from the March 19, 2020 situation report: Seven new countries/territories/areas (African Region [3], Eastern Mediterranean Region [1], European Region [1], and Region of the Americas [2]) have reported cases of COVID-19. • The number of…
Janet Currie has a nice review article (Currie 2020) in Health Economics covering this topic. She summarizes the literature as follows: In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research demonstrating that child health is an important form of human capital. Healthier children live longer and healthier lives, get more education, and…
In theory, single payer systems are the best approach to deal with existential threats or pandemics. The strengths of single-payer, top-down approaches are that having most funds–and potentially most workers–within a single entity can lower coordination cost and lead to a more effective response. The key drawback of single payer, top-down systems is they typically…
A paper by Hernandez et al. (2020) in JAMA examines trends in branded drug prices using data from SSR Health between 2007 and 2018. The authors find the following: From 2007 to 2018, list prices increased by 159% (95% CI, 137%-181%), or 9.1% per year, while net prices increased by 60% (95% CI, 36%-84%), or…
Interesting video on exponential growth, logistic curves, contagious disease and COVID-19 from the always enlightening 3Blue1Brown.
COVID-19: Graphical display of WHO Situation Reports NBA suspends season. NCAA tournament cancelled. Showing some Love. Non-COVID-19 What is hypocognition? What is hyper-subadditivity? Inequality after age 65.
According to a recent paper by Young, Gruca and Nelson (2020), the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the Iowa Health Professions Inventory (IHPI) to measure the number of professionals in a given area, data from the US Census’ American Community Survey (ACS) to measure the number of individuals in a given area.…
Perhaps the answer is ‘yes’. A paper by Gao et al. (2020) attempts to answer that question. We identify a positive causal effect of healthy working environments on corporate innovation, using the staggered passage of U.S. state-level laws that ban smoking in workplaces. We find a significant increase in patents and patent citations for firms…
COVID-19 has caught the headlines, and for good reason. According to the WHO, there have been 109,577 confirmed cases (3993 new on 9 Mar 2020) and 3809 deaths (225 new as of 9 Mar 2020) The stock market has plunged. Sporting events have been halted all over Italy. And the rise of cases has been…
Talking to kids about coronavirus. FDA on RWE. Should pharmacists be able to order labs? Health policy econometrics: DiD vs. SC vs. IFE vs. GSC COVID-19 for startups.