Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Quality of care is difficult to measure. Even if you had a perfect measure of quality in terms of health outcomes, risk adjustment is imperfect. For instance, academic medical centers are often assumed to have high quality, but actual outcomes observed in the data may not be that good if they also receive the sickest,…
Standard cost-effectiveness analysis assumes that any gain in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) should be valued equally. This does not sound unreasonable, but is it true in practice? Consider two potential violations of constant value of QALY gains: scope insensitivity and severity independence. I define each of these below: Scope insensitivity. This assumes that individuals value…
At first glance, John Cochrane makes a compelling case that pay toilets should not be illegal. The absence of pay toilets is in fact a delightful encapsulation of so much that is wrong with American economic policy these days. Activists decide free toilets are a human right, and successfully campaign to ban pay toilets. For…
A few facts: Pharma is increasingly a key driver of US R&D. Pharmaceutical firms share of R&D increased from <10% in the early 1970s to 24% in 2018 (among firms in Compustat data). Moreover, 5 out of top 10 largest R&D spenders in Compustat in 2010 were pharmaceutical firms. A majority of drugs are targeted…
Once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself. Yeonmi Park, escapee from North Korea, author of In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom
Budget impact models aim to let payers know how much a new drug will cost them. Clearly, payer cost depends on the dose. Some drugs are dosed the same for everyone. Other drugs are dosed based on patient weight, body surface area (BSA) or other criteria. If you’re a building a budget impact model, how…
‘If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?’ This is a common parenting phrase is meant to motivate kids to reject peer’s actions that are bad behaviors. While this blogger will not comment how effective this parenting phrase is, peer effects are real. Consider the recent NBER working paper by Finkelstein, Gentzkow, and…
From John Maynard Keynes’ Essays in Biography: The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An…
Results from a survey titled “Coronavirus Impact and Recovery of the Small Businesses Economy“, which has collected responses from over 520,000 business owners in the US and Canada. Some general positive trends, but still over 20% of small business owners have concerns of their financial reserves running out and nearly 20% are concerned that the…
Healthcare Economist was named one of the Top 100 Economics blogs of 2020 by the Intelligent Economist website. In fact, it was the first blog listed in the “Sub-field economic blog” category. Please do check out the full list as well.