HWR: ‘Election is over’ edition
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at the Colorado Health Insurance Insider. There are a bunch of great articles analyzing how Obama and the Democratic Congress will change health care in America.
Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at the Colorado Health Insurance Insider. There are a bunch of great articles analyzing how Obama and the Democratic Congress will change health care in America.
Google searches as a public health resource: Google.org has released Flu Trends, an online reporting tool for flu-related search activity. It’s long been theorized that Google’s search data would be useful to predict epidemics. This is the first time they’ve released a tool like this to the public. As they say on the main page: We have found a…
Should the U.S. have universal healthcare? The National Physicians Alliance says ‘Yes’, but the Institute for Policy Innovation says ‘No.’ You can voice your opinion at Opposing Views.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Medical CPI is only 3.2%. This is less than the 4.1% average inflation rate over the past ten years and the 6.0% average medical inflation rate over the past 30 years. In most markets, a slowing economy reduces demand and reduces prices (see the recent decline in oil…
Is it better for a physician to have more information or less? Should physicians utilize diagnostic support systems (DSS) which base their recommendations on hundreds or thousands of data points or should they trust their gut instinct? Most rational people would say that physicians should use DSS–not blindly–but as a tool to guide their decisionmaking.…
The pharmaceutical industry is well known for taking doctors (and medical students) out to nice dinners, giving them presents, and doing whatever they can to entice physicians to prescribe their drug. Now, health insurers are following the pharmaceutical companies lead. The AP reports that in order to convince physicians to prescribe generic drugs, a Rochester…
The Think Progress Wonk Room says that President-elect Obama will reverse the Bush-era rule that NGOs must refrain from promoting family planning measures if they wish to receive federal funding: “…While the policy was “purportedly designed to reduce abortion by limiting a woman’s access to abortion services, and to ensure that U.S. funding for family…
A recent JHE article by Park and Kang wonder if more education induces people to have a healthier lifestyle. They use data on Korean men to see if this is the case. They find that “an increase in education induces individuals to exercise regularly, and to get regular health checkups…[but]…education has little effect on smoking…
Placebos are important for medical research. In order to determine if a certain pharmaceutical is effective, researchers compare medical outcomes between one group given the drug and another given a placebo. But should physicians give placebos to patients outside of clinical trials? The Economist magazine reports (“Great Expectations“) on the phenomenon that many physicians are…
“Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product-—$700 billion per year –goes to tests and procedures that do not actually improve health outcomes…The unreasonably high cost of health care in the United States is a deeply entrenched problem that must be attacked at its root.” This…