Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A paper by Fabre and Straub (2023) examines how public-private partnerships (PPP) have worked in practice. Why would linking public and private provisions of goods and services be useful? One reason is that the public sector might have policy goals (e.g., providing health care to the poor), which the private sector may not provide in…
Why is it so hard for academic medical centers to succeed in value-based care? I think the “Better Care Plan” is more focused on cost reduction than actually ‘better care’. Peer effects and generic drug purchases. Using cosmic rays. SLR on value-based purchasing. Should there be a sales tax on diapers? Supreme Court strikes down…
That is the finding from a paper by Geruso, Layton and Wallace (2023). They exploit the random assignment of approximately 70,000 Medicaid beneficiaries to Medicaid managed care (MMC) plans from 2008 to 2012 in New York City. In short, beneficiaries in New York who did not actively choose a plan within a designated choice period…
Historically, physician administered specialty pharmaceuticals are covered by a patient’s medical benefit and oral medications are covered by the pharmacy benefit. Increasingly, however, specialty pharmaceuticals are being covered by pharmaceutical benefit. Does this make a difference? Does medical vs. pharmacy coverage of drugs impact patient access? A recent paper by Levine et al. (2023) aims…
A paper by Hsia et al. (2023) shows that California emergency department capacity is not keeping up with demand and is increasingly concentrated in fewer facilities. Using data from the California Department of Health Care Access and Information and US Census, the authors find that: In the prepandemic period (2011-2019), the total population of California…
The answer depends on a number of factors. These include: (i) are there interactions between the entity and the environment, (ii) does the model have a time component, (iii) is the model a cohort or individual level model, (iv) is the model continuous or discrete states, and (v) is it Markovian or not. The Brennan…
Drug shortages. Smart toilet seat to monitor health. “The honesty paper is even more dishonest than we thought.” Criteria for payer coverage of DTx. IRA fines are starting. U.S. Chamber of Commerce sues to stop IRA price negotiation. 7% of clinical text messages contain an emoji. US annual primary care spending: $439/person.
As reported based on a N.Y. Times/KFF survey: A majority of Americans with health insurance said they had encountered obstacles to coverage, including denied medical care, higher bills and a dearth of doctors in their plans… About 40 percent of those surveyed said they had delayed or gone without care in the last year because…
Let’s say you are interested in measuring the relationship between type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and depression. In many cases, one would use electronic health records data and conduct a logistic regression with depression as the dependent variable and T2DM (potentially along with demographics and other comorbidities) as the independent variables. However, the use of…
An interesting study from Masters et al. (2023): Induction of labor (IOL) rates in the United States have nearly tripled since 1990. We examine official U.S. birth records to document increases in states’ IOL rates among pregnancies to Black, Latina, and White women. We test if the increases are associated with changes in demographic characteristics…