Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Special thanks to Joe Paduda to bringing back the best review of health wonkery on the web. Joe writes: Way back in the day Julie Ferguson and I came up with the idea of working with other health care bloggers to publish the best of each every couple of weeks…after a decade-long run we suspended it…
An interesting finding from Liu, Wang, Jin and Lu (2025): While the labor market effects of industrial robots have been extensively studied, their broader health implications, particularly on chronic diseases, remain unexplored. This study fills this gap by linking China’s national-industry robot adoption data to individual health records from the China Health and Nutrition Survey…
UK to pay more for pharmaceuticals? Prior distributions for regression coefficients. What is the “Rural Health Fund” Pedestrian deaths in the US (Part 1, 2) US physicians in private practice dropped from 60.1% (2012) to 42.2% (2024).
Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt. The Nobel Prize committee said that the award was merited “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress” The Nobel Prize committee summarizes their key contributions as follows: Over the last two centuries, for the first time in history, the world has seen sustained economic…
President Trump’s May 12 Executive Order around Most-Favored-Nation drug pricing argues that countries outside the US need to raise their prices on pharmaceuticals saying that many other countries are “freeloading” and paying less than their share for pharmaceuticals. In response, pharmaceutical companies have increased prices in the UK and even threatened to “walk away” from…
Impact of the government shutdown on health services. Why do patients with sickle cell disease disproportionately leave hospitals against medical advice? New estimates of upcoding. TrumpRx. “FDA will not be able to accept applications for new drugs, generics, biologics, biosimilars or medical devices that require payment of a user fee while the shutdown is in…
EndPoints notes that the Most Favored Nation Executive Order has led some large pharmaceutical firms to make two changes: (i) start charging Europeans the same price as the US, and (ii) start selling more products direct to consumer (a.k.a. ‘pharm to table‘) AbbVie, Novartis and Boehringer Ingelheim each joined their peers in making price-related concessions…
What is Double descent. Repeal of Noneconomic Damage Caps and Medical Malpractice Insurance Premiums. Reform of FDA use of external experts? Deep learning for solving economic models. Did RFK Jr. make former CDC Chief roll back vaccine policies without evidence?
Impact of robots on workers comp. What drives low income inequality in Nordic countries? Wean patients off GLP-1s? Ebola outbreak. Will Most Favored Nation backfire?
“NHS will pay diet apps who help to slim patients with weight-loss drugs” AI is creating new math. Denmark economy and Novo Nordisk. CDC resignations continue. Employer strategies for reference-based pricing of provider reimbursement.