Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Why do nonprofit hospitals exist? If they act exactly as for-profit hospitals, then they should be under private ownership. If they act according to some other maximization strategy, what is it? These are the questions that Jill Horwitz and Austin Nichol look to answer in their 2007 NBER working paper. First, let us examine the…
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Insurance Help Hub. The posts by Joe Paduda and Michael Cannon are particularly interesting.
Many economists claim that Americans are spendthrifts and for good reason. The average American has over $9000 of credit card debt. Why don’t we act more like the Japanese and save? A NBER working paper by Charles Yuji Horioka, Wataru Suzuki, Tatsuo Hatta claim that Japan’s high saving rates in the 70s and 80s were…
Do you want some hard data concerning healthcare bloggers? For instance, you may want to know the profession of most healthcare bloggers. You may wonder whether or not healthcare bloggers trust other healthcare bloggers. Finally, one may be curious as to the age, sex, and race of a typical healthcare blogger. If you want answers…
Yesterday afternoon at 6:40 pm local time, Perú experienced a devastating earthquake. According to the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio: Al menos 437 muertos y 80 mil damnificados dejó el terremoto Así lo dijo el director regional de Operaciones del Indeci, Arístides Mussio, tras el sismo de 7,9 grados Richter que remeció el país el miércoles.…
This questions seems very straightforward theoretically. If each appointment takes 20 minutes, then one should schedule patients at 8, 8:20 8:40, 9, etc. The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! – Robert Burns In reality, however, this scheduling plan rarely…
Many times on this blog, I have commented about pay-for-performance (P4P) programs. A healthcare economist, physician, or health services researcher may wonder where they can get data regarding P4P. In truth, getting P4P data is difficult; this is reinforced by the fact that for most physicians, P4P incentives make up a small portion of their…
The Marshable Social Networking news site reported yesterday (“Google Health…“) that Google is developing a program which will store individual health information. This is an area of significant need since a vast majority of physicians don’t have electronic records. The article states: “Codenamed ‘Weaver,’ the upcoming project will be a health information storage program. With…
What is a good metric to measure if a doctor is adequately vaccinating their patients? For instance, is the pediatrician Dr. Smith doing an adequate job of giving his patients flu shots? One of the easiest, and most common metrics used is simply the vaccination rate. Vaccination rate = (nbr of patients vaccinated)/(total nbr of…
Greg Mankiw has a great post on Advice for Grad Students, with links to advice given by David Romer, Hal Varian, David Laibson and more. Cochrane’s “Writing Tips for PhD students” is especially helpful for graduate students who are attempting to write scholarly articles.