APGAR Score

P4P.  Evidence-based medicine.  Insurers and policymakers want to be sure that patient insurance premiums are being used towards high quality medical care. One example of quality evaluation in practice is the Apgar Score.  In 1952, Dr. Virginia Apgar developed this metric to evaluate the health of newborns.  Newborns receive a 0, 1, or 2 score on 5…

Quotation of the day

It’s a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, surprising, but it takes the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it.  It is the most fascinating and the most dreadful of spectacles…the most dreadful because it’s so real; you can never pride yourself on truly knowing the sea unless…

Getting Naked

The physician-patient interaction can be a strange one.  Patients leave their most important possession–themselves–in the hand of strangers.  Typically conservative women will bare their naked bodies to physicians.   Although rare, the possibility exists for the physician to take advantage of this situation.   In the U.S. “4 percent of the disciplinary order that state medical…

Why do we die?

What factors predict how long we live?  What are the best ways to forestall death? The determinants of premature death are 40% behavoiral, 30% genetic, but only 10% medical care.  It is important to remember that medical care and health are far from synonomous.

The birth of the N.H.S.

Why did the British decide to have the government pay for health care?  Are they socialists by nature?  Were they just ahead of their time?  Did some lobbyist win the favor of government? Actually, it was done out of practicality.  World War II shifted the provision of health care from the private to the public…

Forthcoming in Health Economics…

Today, my paper titled “Operating on commission: How physician financial incentives affect surgery rates” was accepted for publication in the journal Health Economics.   A summary of the paper’s findings is below. This paper employs a nationally representative, household-based dataset in order to test how the compensation method of both specialists and primary care providers…

Bright young Economists

The Economist magazine has a listing of the eight up-and-coming economists.  Below is a list of their names and some commentary if applicable. Amy Finkelstein.  Dr. Finkelstein researches in the public and health economics fields.  I have featured here work multiple times on this blog (see here, here, here, here and here). Jesse Shapiro.  I…

Optimal Contracts in the British NHS

One of the perennial questions of interest for health services researchers how to pay for health care.  A paper by Chalkley and McVicar (2008) examines this question in the contest of a reform in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). “After 1990 hospitals, which had previously been under the direct control of Health Authorities, could apply for NHS…