Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A recent paper in the Health Services Research journal (“Hospice…“) looks at whether hospice care reduces hospitalizations for elderly terminally ill patients in nursing homes. In the introduction, authors Pedro Gozalo and Susan Miller state that there are two main implications which result from end-of-life hospitalizations: “At the patient level, hospitalizations of frail NH [nursing…
Does health insurance increase utilization of medical services? Economic theory generally predicts that it will. Health insurance decreases the price individuals pay for medical care and thus the equilibrium quantity of medical care used will increase. A paper by Buchmueller, Grumbach, Kronick and Kahn (âEffect of Health Insurance on Medical Care Utilization…â?) examines this phenomenon…
Robin Hanson has spent the last week blogging on his Overcoming Bias website asking individuals to sign a petitions to redo the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE). For those who do not know what the RAND HIE, Mr. Hanson has two posts (#1 and #2) describing the experiment. I agree with Mr. Hanson when he…
Pay-for-performance or health care quality report cards are the latest fad in medicine. Different types of report cards, however, measure different things. Eve Kerr and co-authors investigate (‘Quality by any other name?’) how different quality measures compare against each other. The authors look at 3 types of physician review: Implicit Review: This involves using ‘subjective’…
According to a paper by Singleton et al. (Am J Infect Control 2005) a significant number of people receive their influenza vaccination at non-traditional sites. While 62% of the elderly receive and influenza vaccination at a traditional doctor’s office or an HMO, individuals in younger age groups are utilizing other centers of care. For individuals…
For non-economists, mental_floss’ book Condensed Knowledge: A deliciously Irreverent Guide to Feeling Smart Again has brief bio’s on 6 of the most famous economists. Each person’s contribution to economics is sucinctly described in a non-technical manner. Click here to see the excerpt. The six economists chosen are: Adam Smith David Ricardo John Maynard Keynes Joseph…
Which hospitals are the innovators of 2007? Joe Paduda points us to to the Fierce Healthcare website which lists the top 10 hopsital innovators of 2007. Two of the top ten include St. Joseph’s Hospital in West Bend, WI and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Mr. Paduda is not overly impressed by the innovation…
An interesting article from Slate discusses an NBER working paper by Paul Oyer (“The Macro-Foundations of Microeconomics: Initial Labor Market Conditions and Long-Term Outcomes for Economists“). Oyer wonders whether or not initial job placement at a high ranking university affects long-term job prospects. Of course, the problem with this analysis is that graduate students with…
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Getting Green blog.
To follow up on Monday’s post, I take a few quotations from Rachel Werner and David Asch’s paper (“The Unintended Consequences“) in the March 9, 2005 edition of JAMA. First, I look at the unintended consequence of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) report cards in a number of U.S. states: In Pennsylvania, which also introduced…