Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) ended in September 2017. This caused a stir as many parent’s relied on CHIP for their children’s health insurance. In January 2018, however, the federal government’s passed a six-year CHIP funding extension and resolved to continue to fund this program. The headlines at the time showed pictures of…
The National Cancer Institute defines personalized medicine as “uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease”. In practice, however, patient treatment is rarely personalized by individual since evidence to support complete personalization is rarely available. Personalization in practice more often means care that varies with some individual characteristics.…
Competition matters for markets…even health care markets. A paper by Van Parys (2018) relies on a database of plan premium and market characteristics among states with federally-facilitated health insurance exchange Marketplaces. In this analysis, she finds that: In 2018, Marketplace premiums were 50 percent ($180) higher, on average, in rating areas with monopolist insurers, compared…
In June of this year, CBO laid out the projected fiscal health of the federal budget over the coming decades in their 2018 Long Term Budget Outlook report. This report project’s “extended baseline” scenarios that assume that all laws on the books will be implemented as written. For instance, if there is a spending bill…
An interesting study from Kolodziej et al. (2018) using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. They aim to measure what happens to adults’ labor force participation when they provide informal care to their parents. To offset the problem of endogeneity, we exploit the availability of other potential caregivers within the family…
That is the conclusion from Dean et al. (2018) published in JAMA Psychiatry. Using a Danish registry of individuals born between 1965 and 1998, the measure the likelihood a crime event (any or violet) between 2001 and 2013. They find that: In a total cohort of 2 058 063 (48.7% male; 51.3% female), the adjusted IRRs…
How do you design a good clinical trial? Clearly, the trial design depends on what question you are answering. For instance consider the dichotomy between an explanatory and pragmatic trial: A pragmatic randomised trial is undertaken in the “real world” and with usual care and is intended to help support a decision on whether to…
How long do sick kids in low-income countries get to spent with their physician at a doctor’s visit? A paper by Kruk et al. (2018) surveys health facilities in Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Nepal, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda to find out. The answer is that patient’s do not get much time at all. The median…
Often times, researchers want to measure the effect of certain interventions in the real-world. Doing this in practice is often difficult. For instance, consider measuring health outcomes among individuals who visit doctors compared to those who don’t. Inevitably, individuals who visit doctors will have worse outcomes. Why? Are doctors killing patients? This is clearly a…
Is statistics taking over journalism? Regression to the mean in the MLB. Use of real-world evidence to measures NSCLC treatment effectiveness. Mental healthcare wait times adversely affect patient outcomes. Using cancer cells to kill cancer. Amazon to fill your Rx as you leave the hospital? Health plan won’t pay your ER bill…or will they? VBID…