Quotation of the Day: On IQ
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points. The Technium, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice“
Month: April 2020
Some good news in the fight against COVID-19
Looks like remdesivir had some positive results against COVID-19. As reported in STAT news: The preliminary data showed that the time to recovery was 11 days on remdesivir compared to 15 days for placebo, a 31% decrease. The mortality rate for the remdesivir group was 8%, compared to 11.6% for the placebo group; that mortality…
Could COVID-19 be a financial boon to health insurers?
Treating serious cases of COVID-19 is expensive. Treatment may require ICU beds, ventilators and lots of specialized staff time. So clearly, COVID-19 is destroying health insurers bottom lines…isn’t it? Not according to a recent article by Kaiser Health News. Because of the quarantine, many individuals are delaying or foregoing elective surgeries. Of course, the costs…
Are value-based agreements the solution to high drug prices?
Drug prices are high. We should only be paying high prices for drugs that have a major impact on patient health and quality of life. Ergo, we should be paying for drugs with value-based agreements (VBAs), right? It turns out the answer is not so simple. A paper by Dubois, Westrich and Buelt (2020) argue…
Friday Links
Falling drug sales. Health benefits of car culture? The second wave? Opioid addiction treatment moves online. Life insurance and COVID-19. Allow pharmacists to test for COVID-19.
Critical Causal Inference Assumptions
You have data. You see that when people receive an intervention, the outcomes differ. Is this effect causal? For this to be the case you need 4 critical assumptions. Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA). This assumes that each treated unit does not affect other units. For instance, consider the case where you imposed a…
Financial Check-up for Medicare and Social Security
Today, the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds released their 2020 report on the financial status of both programs (report, summary). The numbers don’t look good. I say this noting also that the projections do not take into account any impacts on mortality, health care costs and taxes revenue from COVID-19. Thus,…
How to deal with treatment switching when analyzing real-world evidence
Is treatment A better than treatment B? This is a standard question in health economics. Typically, the answer is determined by a clinical trial. Treatment efficacy (as measured in a trial), however, may not match treatment effectiveness (as measured in the real world). For instance, patient adherence to treatment may be worse, if the treatment…
Things we know about health economics due to Amy Finkelstein
MIT Technology Review has an interesting profile of Amy Finkelstein, an MIT professor and one of my favorite health economists. [Full disclosure: I’ve never met Amy Finkelstein, I just enjoy her research]. The article is interesting throughout, but below I excerpt a sidebar showing 8 things that we know about health economics due to Finkelstein’s…
Friday Links
Retail after COVID. Is California a COVID success story or an impending disaster? Trump halts funding to WHO. Why everyone dies too early. No sports in LA until 2021? Debt > 100% GDP?