Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In 2006, Columbia/HCA was forced to return $1.7 billion to the federal government for defrauding Medicare. How was the federal government able to amass such strong evidence against HCA in order to win such a large settlement? The answer to the question is revealed in a book called Undercover by John W. Schilling. The book…
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at The Sentinel Effect.
Contagious disease are spread (generally) when one person comes in contact with another. Thus, the number of links in a network (the number of connections one has) will go a long way to determining how fast diseases are spread. One question which needs to be answered is whether a hub-and-spoke network or a more diffused…
What is the typical salary of an Economist just after they finish graduate school? This question is of particular interest to me personally, since I am going on the job market this year. Below are some of the results from the Survey of the Labor Market for New Ph.D. Hires in Economics, from the University…
The Boston Globe reports that some of Massachusetts largest insurers are beginning to cover medical visits made at retail clinics at CVS and Walgreens drug stores. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Minnesota is waiving copays for visits to retail clinics. The American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) is not happy about this. Carpe Diem says the…
As an academic researcher, using the web has made my life significantly easier. I can access millions of articles from academic journals in the click of a button. Sites such as JStor and ScienceDirect have hundreds of journals located in the same place for easy use. With so much more information online, I am able…
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at David Williams’ Health Business Blog.
For researchers interested in studying the Medicare prescription drug benefit, CMS has claims data for Medicare Part D. Academy Health also has a useful powerpoint presentation giving some more information regarding Medicare Part D and what information is available as part of the CMS Medicare Part D claims data.
Your doctor says you have six months to live. How accurate is this figure? Do you really have 4 moths to live? One year? A paper by Alexander and Christakis (2008) analyzes physicians predictions of patient survival. The authors find that physicians systematically overestimate how long the patient will live. This bias is exacerbated when…
On Friday I reported that the U.S. scored poorly on the Commonwealth Fund’s National Scorecard. Those in favor of universal health care are probably rejoicing. “The U.S. system is dysfunctional beyond repair and we need universal health care!” Yesterday, the Economist reported on an article in The Lancet Oncology journal which found that the U.S.…