Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Medicaid currently accounts for roughly 50% of all nursing home expenditures and 70% of all bed days. The government mandates that nursing homes provide a uniform level of quality to all residents, regardless of the payer type. Yet one may ask: does this mandate hold in reality? Nursing homes may have an incentive to segregate private insurance…
A common assumption is that longer life expectancy leads to economic growth. If longevity is a proxy for health and we expect healthier workers to be more productive, longevity should lead to more economic productivity. Further, if individuals live longer, they will have a longer payback period for their investments in human capital (i.e.: education).…
Generalists can give holistic, cost-effective care to patients, but may be limited in their ability to treat complex diseases. Specialist may offer a superior quality of medical services and advance knowledge in their field, but this premium medicine comes at a high cost. Generalist or specialist…Specialist or generalist…which to chose? A 1996 New England Journal of…
There is a dynamic relationship between generalists and specialists. Currently, 4.5% of visits to PCPs result in a referral. A RAND study and my own investigation of the 1998-1999 Community Tracking Survey show that about 10% of individuals are hospitalized at least once each year. How should we model the decision patients face between generalist and specialist care.…
The so-called genius awards (actually called the MacArthur Foundation fellows) are given to 25 individuals based on “their creativity, originality, and potential to be significant contributors in their fields.” Recipients receive $500,000 over five years with no strings attached. One of the recipients which interests this blog is Victoria Hale (bio). She is a pharmaceutical…
Many data sets that social scientists come across use disproportionate stratified sampling. If a subpopulation is small, the survey designers may want to oversample this group. For example, in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) poor individuals are oversampled and in the Community Tracking Study (CTS) uninsured individuals are oversampled in order to…
In 5 years, the oldest baby boomers will hit 65 years old. As the boomers begin to retire, this enormous cohort will start to sell off their financial assets in order to finance consumption in their non-working years. One begins to wonder if there will be a stock market crash since equities demand may drop significantly. …
The Envisioning 2.0 (“Drug Importation“) speaks to the fact that the FDA has consistently tried to prohibit the importation of drugs from abroad, despite the fact that drug importation has broad popular support. Further the post cites a USA Today report which says that the US (but not Canada) has a serious drug counterfeiting problem.
Moral hazard and adverse selection are ever-present problems in the health insurance market. Identifying their existence and their magnitudes is difficult. Most of the papers presented in this blog have used a reduced form approach [see Finkelstein, McGarry (2003) and Bhattacharya, Vogt (2006)]. Today we will look at a paper by Bajari, Hong and Khwaja where the…
Seven hundred twenty million dollars. This would the the annual cost to immunize all girls against the human papilloma virus (HPV). According to the Detroit Free Press (“Law…“), the state of Michigan is considering requiring all girls entering the sixth grade to receive the HPV vaccine. Is this good policy? Cervical cancer affects 9,700 women…