Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
New Year’s Eve is a day with significant alcohol consumed. In fact, New Year’s Eve falls behind only Mardi Gras in terms of the number of drinks consumed for that holiday. According to the National Institute of Health, excess alcohol consumption has a number health consequences including impacts on the brain, heart (increased risk of…
Will Medicare drug price negotiation increase drug prices for the commercially insured? Gottlieb: FDA and at-home testing. Physician noncompete agreements. To Hope or Not to Hope. Gains from trade.
How does quarantining impact COVID-19 deaths? Just comparing individuals who did compared to did not quarantine is problematic since this will be a non-randomized sample. Individuals who adhere to quarantine recommendations may be more careful overall (e.g., better mask adherence, less likely to be smokers, conduct more preventive care) and thus the benefits of quarantining…
A paper by Ahmad and Anderson in JAMA last spring examined trends in the causes of death in the US. Below are the charts in terms of both the number of deaths and the share of total deaths. The data come from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The…
According to a study Bovell-Ammon et al. (2021) in JAMA Open, the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which tracks a nationally representative cohort of noninstitutionalized youths aged 15 to 22 years in 1979 through 2018. The authors used cumulative incidence function estimates to compare Blacks…
Medicare Advantage for all. Christmas deadweight loss? EUA for molnupiravir. Propublica: Why the FDA blocked cheap rapid tests. Why to get a booster.
Healthcare Economist will be on vacation this week. Posts will resume on Monday, December 27.
Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (HCP LAN) is dedicated to moving the health care system from volume-based, fee-for-service reimbursement, to alternative payment models (APM). While there are a large number of different types of APMs, broadly, all of them shift more financial risk to providers while also linking reimbursement to quality of care.…
When you want to measure the causal impact of an intervention, there are a number of different approaches. Difference in difference (DiD) and the synthetic control method (SCM) are two common methods, each of which I have already provided econometric overview summaries (DiD, SCM). A paper by Arkhangelsky et al (2021) in AER summarizes the…
From CMS’s office of the Actuary as reported in Health Affairs today: US health care spending increased 9.7 percent to reach $4.1 trillion in 2020, a much faster rate than the 4.3 percent increase seen in 2019. The acceleration in 2020 was due to a 36.0 percent increase in federal expenditures for health care that occurred largely in response…