Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The concept of diminishing return is one that pervades much of economics. A Health Affairs article (“U.S Health Care Spending…“) by health economist Uwe Reinhardt and co-authors claims that since the U.S. spends more per-person on health care, the marginal benefit of any treatment is low due to diminishing returns. This hypothesis got me thinking…
A working paper by Yolanda K. Kodrzycki and Pingkang David Yu of the Boston Fed attempts to rank economic journals according to their: 1) impact within the Economics field, 2) overall impact, 3) Policy Impact and 4) impact on non-economic journals. The top 10 journals in each category are as follows: Within Economics Overall Impact…
When constructing policy, we are often faced by an equity-efficiency tradeoff. For instance, increasing welfare benefits will increase equity but may reduce a poor individual’s incentive to work if the welfare benefits are tied to having low income. A recent NBER working paper by the nobel laureate James Heckman and co-author Dimitriy Masterov (“…Investing in…
“…in a similar way, the slow growth of the coloring industry in the U.S. before the First World War was largely due to patent protection: most patents were held by the large German companies, such as Bayer, BASF, Hoechst and IG Farben. The chemical industry in the US was so underdeveloped, that during the First…
The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) is a “not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality.” One of their major initiatives is the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) which aims to evaluate the quality of care offered by various health plans. In a 2001 NBER working paper (“Learning…“), researchers Michael Chernew,…
âCan you imagine if a Wal-Mart store operated like Americaâs health care system? You would walk into the store and there would be a huge array of merchandise. But you would not be able to tell the products apart. You would not know how much they cost. And in the end, you would not know…
There is an interesting post at GoozNews (“Getting Doctors to Compete“) in which Merrill Goozner comments on Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter’s belief that competition and integrated care are the solutions to the nation’s health care woes. “Where we need to go is an integrated practice model,” he said. His model entails patient-focused practice…
The Cavalcade of Risk is up at The Digerati Life blog. Not only do I really like the format of this Carnival, but there is a great picture that will make any surfer shake in their wetsuit.
Do increases in government spending affect health outcomes? While this seems like a simple question, proving whether or not spending impacts outcomes is difficult. There are questions of reverse causality: the governments of countries or regions with more serious health problems ceteris paribus may decide to increase their allocation of health spending; thus one may…
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), there is an interesting article about public health interventions to combat influenza epidemics. These nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) include closure of schools, churches, and theaters. The authors find the following results: “…cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had…