Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A frequent topic of investigation in health economics is to estimate the elasticity of the demand for medical procedures with respect to wait times. A paper by Martin, Rice, Jacobs and Smith in the Journal of Health Economics uses quarterly data from 200 English hospitals between 1995-2002 in order to separately estimate the supply and…
Does waiting longer for a medical appointment increase mortality? According to Julia Prentice and Steven Piezer’s 2007 article it does. The authors have data regarding individual wait times for Veterans Affairs (VA) geriatric visits as well as subsequent mortality data on each individual. There are two major problems when trying to link increased wait times…
In a recent NBER working paper (“Tradeoffs“), authors Christopher Afendulis and Daniel Kessler, pose an interesting question: should the physician who is diagnosing you also be the one who provides treatment? On the one hand, a physician who both diagnoses and provides treatment has a financial incentive to recommend to the patient that they should…
A few weeks ago I was able to attend Till von Wachter’s presentation on his working paper “Mortality, Mass-Layoffs, and Career Outcomes: An Analysis using Administrative Data,” co-written with Daniel Sullivan. The authors investigated whether or not losing one’s job affects mortality rates. There could be many reasons why losing one’s job may affect mortality.…
Consumer-directed health plans (CDHP) have been a topic of much interest in the United States of late. In order to increase competition between health plans, in 1996 the German government began a program to allow consumers to have a free choice of their social health insurers plan. Since the federal government sets a high minimum…
In recent years, the federal government has attempted to increase access to government provided health insurance. Between 1984 and 2004, the percentage of non-elderly individual with government provided health insurance rose from 13.5% to 17.5%. Over the same time period, however, the percentage of American without health insurance also rose from 13.7% to 17.8%. In…
Child mortality from unintentional injury or accident has been dropping over the last thirty years. Among children under 5, accident rates resulting in death have fallen from 44 deaths per 100,000 population in 1960 to 18.6 deaths per 100,000 in 1990. For children aged six to twelve years old, the analogous fall is from 19.6…
An interesting paper by Douglas Almond (2006) examines whether or not influenza infections of pregnant mothers can influence long-term outcomes of the in utero babies. Almond uses the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic in the United States as a source of exogenous variation to test the fetal origins hypothesis. The fetal origins hypothesis states that “certain…
Most economists believe that increasing the price of an item will decrease demand for the item. Health care is no different from any other good. If you increase the copayment or coinsurance rate, people will consume fewer medical services. The famous RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE) demonstrated that higher coinsurance rates discourage medical care consumption.…
If taxation reduces the amount of hours worked, why does Scandinavia—which has some of the world’s highest tax rates—have labor force participation (LFP) rates similar to the U.S? This is the question addressed by Richard Rogerson in the NBER working paper âTaxation and market work: Is Scandinavia an outlier?â? The study looks at three…