Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Based on a recent study in Nature Aging as summarized in the New York Times: Inflammation is a natural immune response that protects the body from injury or infection. Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as “inflammaging” — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises…
Renaming schizophrenia: why, how, and what next? COVID-19 winners and losers. Labor market (not supply chain) caused COVID-19 inflation? Medicare Advantage dental benefits. NC eliminating parking minimums.
CMS’s Office of the Actuary predicts that national healthcare expenditures (NHE) will increase from 17.6% of GDP in 2023 to 20.3% of GDP by 2033. The Keehan et al. (2025) paper provides more details: National health expenditures are projected to have grown 8.2 percent in 2024 and to increase 7.1 percent in 2025, reflecting continued…
From an interesting review paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Craig Garthwaite: Although research and development investments clearly respond to market opportunities, the exact benefits created by these incremental investments remain unclear. This is largely because the exact marginal products developed in response to these incentives are elusive to identify. Certainly, the amount…
AHIP (formerly America’s Health Insurance Plans) released a statement yesterday saying that their health plan members “announced a series of commitments to streamline, simplify and reduce prior authorization.” 48 US health plans signed off on the statement. What were AHIP’s 6 commitments? Standardizing Electronic Prior Authorization. Participating health plans will work toward implementing common, transparent submissions…
That is the title of my paper out today in the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research written with co-authors Adam Kittai, Dipen Patel, Nadine Zawadzki, Vikram Shetty, Yazan Barqawi, and Joanna Rhodes. The abstract is below. Aim: To estimate cost savings associated with covalent Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor (cBTKi) choice in patients with treatment-naive (TN) and…
Impact of ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ on rural hospital finances Brain implant lets patient with ALS speak and sing Impact of children’s disability on parent’s mental health. COVID is back? How does this man defy aging?
Suppose you have a single pill at your disposal and that pill will extend any person’s life by 10 years. You have to choose to give it to one of the following tow individuals: a 20‐year‐old patient, who will live for 10 more years if she gets the drug, and then she dies; a 70‐year‐old…
A paper by Daniotti et al. (2025) examines 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024). The authors trained neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in the GitHub code. As one can see below, nearly 1/3 of code in the US is being written by AI as of the end of 2024. US: 30.1% Germany: 24.3% France:…
Here are statistics from the CDC about the 1,197 individuals (as of 13 June 2025) that have been infected with measles during the 2025 outbreak: 793 were children (347 (29%) aged <5; 446 (37%) aged 5-19) 5% were previously vaccinated (2% with 1 MMR dose; 3% with 2 MMR doses) 144 (12%) were hospitalized 3…