Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
MIT Technology Review has an interesting profile of Amy Finkelstein, an MIT professor and one of my favorite health economists. [Full disclosure: I’ve never met Amy Finkelstein, I just enjoy her research]. The article is interesting throughout, but below I excerpt a sidebar showing 8 things that we know about health economics due to Finkelstein’s…
Amy Finkelstein is one of my favorite healthcare economists and recently BusinessWeek ran an article (“So that’s why it’s so expensive“) profiling her and her work. I have profiled Ms. Finkelstein before in my June 15th post describing her 2005 paper with McGarry. She also has a new NBER working paper (“The aggregate effects of health…
That is the question asked by a recent NBER working paper by Chandra et al. (2023). This question is important for a variety of reasons. First, quality measure data collection is expensive. Saraswathula et al. 2023 found that Johns Hopkins Hospital had to report 162 unique quality metrics, and the cost for collecting these data…
This is a question that can be answered empirically but doing so is challenging. While cross-country comparisons are feasible for comparing public and private health care provisions, often there are many other differences between health care systems across country. Within any given country, there is significant selection bias in terms of who receives public vs.…
From Einav and Finkelstein (2023): …while 12.5% of individuals under 65 are uninsured at a point in time, twice as many—one in four—are uninsured at some point over a 2-y period. Moreover, the risk of losing insurance remained virtually unchanged with the introduction of the landmark ACA. Risk of insurance loss is particularly high for…
Based on one study from Sweden, the answer is ‘no’. A paper by Johansson and Svensson (2022) use data from Sweden on regional variation in drug spending. First, some background on the Swedish approach for prescription drugs spending. The Swedish national health service offers universal coverage for all residents. The system is decentralized in 21…
How did COVID-19 affect mortality rates and how did that vary by racial and ethnic groups? Using January 2011 – April 2020 data from the Census Bureau’s version of the Social Security Administration’s Numerical Identification (Numident) database, a paper by Polyakova et al. (2021) find significantly higher all-cause excess mortality rates for minority groups, particularly…
‘If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?’ This is a common parenting phrase is meant to motivate kids to reject peer’s actions that are bad behaviors. While this blogger will not comment how effective this parenting phrase is, peer effects are real. Consider the recent NBER working paper by Finkelstein, Gentzkow, and…
There is a large literature on this topic including fairly recent work from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (see Finkelstein et al. (QJE 2012), Baicker et al. AER 2014, Finkelstein et al. JPE 2019). Many of these studies look at the population level; as the majority of people are healthy, the incremental benefit for health…
In the U.S., 5% of the population account for 50% of expenditures. Many of these so-called “superutilizers” have multiple comorbidities; some of these patients face economic challenges, while others may contend with mental illness. One approach to attempt to improve quality and reduce cost is to provide these high-cost patients with supplemental services. One question…