Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
[Disclaimer: this post provides the math behind how to answer this question without actually answering the question] If you get a positive test for COVID-19, how likely are you to have the disease? Well, this depends on a number of factors including the baseline prevalence of COVID-19 in your area as well as the test…
Appropriateness of step therapy. Fiscal impact of anti-obesity medications. Can individual hospitals survive? A health economist takes on Kenya’s pandemic. The invisible graveyard.
Is your observational research study following best practices? Is your methodology transparent? To help answer these questions, the Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research (EQUATOR) Network created the STROBE guidelines. The STROBE guidelines–an acronym for The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology–aim to improve the transparency of the methods behind observational…
How can we best accelerate vaccine availability? This is the question that Ahuja et al. (2021) try to answer in their Becker-Friedman Institute (BFI) working paper. First, they state the obvious: the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is large. Specifically: Each month, the COVID pandemic kills 300,000 people (as of Jan. 2021) and reduces global…
Let’s say that drug A works better for one race than another. Or that disease prevalence is more common for some races than others. Despite the goal to be color-blind in medicine, racial information can prove useful. For instance, sickle cell disease is much more common among African Americans in the US than other races.…
Last week, my Healthcare Economist blog celebrated its 15th year of existence. I started this blog in graduate school at UC-San Diego in January of 2016 with the very original inaugural post titled “Welcome!“. Since then, I’ve written more than 4,600 posts on various topics of in health and economics. Some of the most popular…
Faster drug access in the Netherlands (Drug Access Protocol) “Hospitals might annually exploit extra reimbursements of about 8%–10% from primary diagnosis manipulations” Comparison of costs and benefits of European country COVID-19 responses Health Affairs’ priorities for Biden. Fauci on Trump.
What insurance is better: private commercial health insurance or public health insurance? This is a more difficult question than it seems since individuals with commercial vs. public health insurance differ over a number of dimensions which affect health care spending, quality and outcomes. To try and get at this question, a paper by Allen et…
Perhaps your friend–let’s call him Karl–thinks that a single payer system is the best health care system. Perhaps another friend–let’s call him Friedrich–disagrees and believe more free market systems work better. Karl thinks that Friedrich doesn’t care about poor people. Friedrich think your friend is naive in believing that the government would do a good…
Who should get the COVID-19 vaccine first? Since I am an economist, let’s try to figure this out mathematically. Let’s give each person or group of people a score or ranking and vaccinate each individual in priority. One key factor, is that we should the vaccine to the people most at risk for the disease.…