Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Special thanks to Joe Paduda to bringing back the best review of health wonkery on the web. Joe writes: Way back in the day Julie Ferguson and I came up with the idea of working with other health care bloggers to publish the best of each every couple of weeks…after a decade-long run we suspended it…
The 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey came out last week. Here are some key findings: Premium costs The average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2025 are $9,325 for single coverage and $26,993 for family coverage. Over the last year, the average single premium increased by 5% and the average family premium increased by…
Generalized risk-adjusted cost effectiveness analysis (GRACE) abandons the assumption of risk neutrality held by traditional cost effectiveness analysis (TCEA). While this sounds like a very technical issue, by allowing for risk aversion over quality of life, GRACE places a relatively higher value on treatments that improve health for more severe diseases and relatively lower value…
How do you write a good grant proposal? How do you write a good proposal for any type of project? Jim Olds– the former head of NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate –provides some fantastic advice in his post “What Grant Reviewers Actually Look For (and What They Ignore)“. He distills what grant reviewers want into 5…
That is the title of a paper published today in Future Oncology with co-authors Erin Mulvey, Kyi-Sin Than, Sanjana Muthukrishnan, Alex Mutebi, Anindit Chhibber, Anthony Wang, Abualbishr Alshreef, Diala Harb, Victor Gonzalez, Sarah Quinlan, Vardhaman Patel and Patrick Connor Johnson. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Lymphoma Research Foundation. The abstract is below:…
An interesting finding from Liu, Wang, Jin and Lu (2025): While the labor market effects of industrial robots have been extensively studied, their broader health implications, particularly on chronic diseases, remain unexplored. This study fills this gap by linking China’s national-industry robot adoption data to individual health records from the China Health and Nutrition Survey…
UK to pay more for pharmaceuticals? Prior distributions for regression coefficients. What is the “Rural Health Fund” Pedestrian deaths in the US (Part 1, 2) US physicians in private practice dropped from 60.1% (2012) to 42.2% (2024).
…is large. At least according to a recent paper by Graham and Mujcic (2025). The focus of the paper is on the on the long term health, emotional and economic impacts of having a hopeful attitude. Hope has agentic properties which are relevant to people’s future outcomes. Following 25,000 randomly sampled Australian adults over a…
Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt. The Nobel Prize committee said that the award was merited “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” The Nobel Prize committee summarizes their key contributions as follows: Over the last two centuries, for the first time in history, the world has seen sustained economic…
That is the title of my guest column at The Evidence Base. An excerpt is below: Multiple indicators suggest that health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) faces unprecedented challenges to its traditional role in pharmaceutical value demonstration. Yet these apparent threats may signal evolution rather than decline – if the field can adapt to serve…