Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Getting from a mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to scaling to manufacture these vaccines for billions of people is far from simple: Manufacturing mRNA vaccines for the first time in a very short timeframe required significant innovation and remains a technically challenging endeavor. The process proved to be technically challenging as Pfizer developed a 50,000 step process.…
Health outcomes have improved in the US over the last 25 years. Clearly public health initiatives (e.g., reduced smoking rates) is having an impact, but another key key question is, what is medical technologies are driving these gains? Is it new surgical techniques, better diagnostics, improved medical devices, or new pharmaceuticals? This answer is difficult…
A paper by Rand and Kesselheim (2021) in Health Affairs this month conducts a systematic literature review to answer this question. Based on 113 articles they identified in peer-reviewed journals, they identify the following 10 criticisms categories. The graph above has each criticism category and the number of peer-reviewed articles that mention this critique type.…
This Sunday I had a very enjoyable experience giving a guest lecture at the University of Southern California’s Healthcare Decision Analysis program (specifically class HCDA 520). The topic of the class was “Health Economics & Outcomes Methodology” and my lecture was on “Novel approaches to quantifying value”. Thank you to Professor Daniel Tomaszewski for inviting…
Biden drug price reform plan. PhRMA response. Vax or tax mandate: CEO response. Cost differences for infused drugs. COVID-19: Should you attend a football game? The beer police.
When you think of health care workers, many think of physicians, nurses and hospital administrators, who often make an above average salary. Not all health care workers, however, are well-paid and many even suffer from food insecurity according to a study by Srinivasan et al. (2021): Using nationally representative data from the period 2013–18, this…
Tyler Cowen has an interesting interview with Harvard health economist David Cutler speaking about (what else?) health economics. Below is an excerpt: CUTLER: Everything that we know in healthcare is that people have difficulty choosing on the basis of price and quality. It goes back a little bit to some of the behavioral issues that…
I have written previously about the need for distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) which would increase the value of treatments who improve the health for individuals who currently have the worst expected quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE). I’ve written about this in AJMC and Health Affairs among other places. One key question many individuals may have is…
On this Labor Day, below find some interesting statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) on health care wages and employment. From the first graph, one can see that health care practitioners (e.g., physicians, nurse) have much higher wages than average but health care support workers (e.g., ) have…
Can you make a telehealth visit from Virginia to a Maryland physician? Florida vaccination rates rising. Ida hits New York. State-by-state school spending and education outcomes California vaccine mandate for health workers