Friday Links
Does intermittent fasting work? Where are we on the monkeypox vaccine? What is “tranq”? What are the impacts of minimum wage in the short- and long-run? How big is the homeless population in the US?
Author: Jason Shafrin
Key obstacle to reducing health disparities: measurement
One of President Biden’s top priorities is reducing health disparities. In fact, President Biden created a Health Equity Task Force to address the issue; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have created their own Framework for Health Equity 2022–2032. The 5 priories in this CMS Framework are: Expand the collection, reporting, and analysis…
Are health care prices falling?
It seems like everything just gets more and more expensive. But are prices for medical care declining? Cutler et al. (1998) found in seminal paper “Are medical prices declining? Evidence for heart attack treatments” that while unadjusted prices of medical care were in fact rising, quality-adjusted health care costs actually were falling. In my own…
Would supply-side policies reduce regional variation in drug spending?
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…
Links
CPO: Chief Psychiatric Officer. Maximizing policy impact. Hospice and private equity. Stats on maternal mortality. Food price inflation and health.
Variation in State Health Care Expenditures
How have medical expenditures varied over time and across states? That is the question being asked by Johnson et al. (2022) in a recent Health Affairs paper. The authors use State Health Expenditure Accounts data between 1999-2014 and then extrapolate these trends forward with a regression-based approach to predict State spending through 2019. Using this…
Why Congress should not mandate disclosure of drug development costs
An article from the Health Affairs forefront article from Ho and Vertinsky (2022) argues ‘yes’, but the use of any such such information for cost-based pricing is short-sighted. The Ho and Vertinsky say drug cost disclosure would be useful because (i) currently there is little information on the cost of drug development, (ii) it is…
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Rare disease burden 10x standard disease. The value of empathy. ACA and political adverse selection Are HDHPs obsolete? Are too many antibiotics prescribed due to fear of malpractice?
Public Option would lead to increased physician shortages
That is the conclusion from a recent report from some of my colleagues at FTI Consulting’s Center for Healthcare Economics and Policy. In the report titled “Protecting the Pipeline: How a Public Option Could Impact Our Nation’s Health Care Workforce“. An excerpt and some empirical findings are below. …government rate setting under a public option…
Venture Capitalists’ Perspectives on Incentives for R&D
A paper by Gracia, David and Conti (2022) in Health Affairs Forefront poses the question ‘how do financial incentives impact venture capitalist’s (VC) investment decisions in early-stage biotech companies, and ultimately innovation?’ To get the answer, the authors interviewed 5 venture capitalists to get their thoughts. Based on these interviews, the authors had 7 key…