Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Perhaps according to a report from Stat News: A groundbreaking clause in a new deal between the Department of Health and Human Services and the pharmaceutical company Regeneron marks the first time the Biden administration has directly used its leverage to challenge drugmakers’ list prices, experts told STAT.The contract between Regeneron and the government requires…
More likely according to: Lepinteur et al. (2023): The theoretical effect [of risk aversion on COVID-19 vaccination] is ambiguous, as both COVID-19 infection and vaccination side-effects involve probabilistic elements. In large-scale data covering five European countries, we find that vaccine hesitancy falls with risk aversion, so that COVID-19 infection is perceived as involving greater risk…
Results below from UNESCO data. Presented without commentary. HT: Marginal Revolution
That is the title of a very interesting paper by Casey Mulligan (2023) [NBER WP version]. The full title includes the phrase “Peltzman revisited”. This refers to a paper by Peltzman (1973).When speaking of the 1962 “Drug Efficacy Amendment” (EA) to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act a key piece of research was Peltzman…
Interesting paper from Ziedan, Simon and Wing (2023): The contraction in health care consumption at the start of the pandemic provides insight into central economic questions of waste and productivity in the U.S. health care system. Using linked mortality and Electronic Medical Records, we compare people who had outpatient appointments scheduled for dates in 30…
Some COVID-19 news updates. 66.5% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 12.09 billion doses have been administered globally, 5.74 million COVID-19 vaccines are administered each day. Only 17.6% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. There have been approximately 550 million cases of COVID-19…
As the COVID-19 pandemic struck, policymakers looked to researchers to both predict the future trend of the pandemic as well as examine how different policy options would impact society. Both epidemiologists and economists rose to the challenge, creating a variety of models to help inform policy decisions. How did the models developed by economists and…
COVID-19 vaccines have had a huge beneficial impact on patient health. One study found that between December 2020 and June 2021, COVID-19 vaccines saved 240,000 lives (Vilches et al. 2022). The figure below shows that as the Delta and Omicron variants spread in the fall of 2021, COVID-19 vaccines prevented significant number of deaths according…
I’ll be attending ISPOR 2022 in Washington DC next week. It’ll be great to see a number of my peers in person after two years of virtual meetings. One of my research papers that will be presented is titled “Economic Impact of Sequential Testing for COVID-19 and Influenza with Molecular Point of Care in 3…
How does quarantining impact COVID-19 deaths? Just comparing individuals who did compared to did not quarantine is problematic since this will be a non-randomized sample. Individuals who adhere to quarantine recommendations may be more careful overall (e.g., better mask adherence, less likely to be smokers, conduct more preventive care) and thus the benefits of quarantining…