Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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.
How much should we value life? This is the question put forth in an interesting book by Howard Steven Friedman called Ultimate Price. The book reviews how economists, policymakers, philosophers and others place a monetary value on life. This could be a value courts place when making awards in lawsuits due to harm or death,…
Queuing models were developed by Agner Erlang in 1904 to help determine the capacity needed for the Dutch telephone system. Since health care systems often have to deal with capacity constrains and plan for unforeseen surges in demand, queuing theory provides a useful approach for many health care research questions. Also, these models are typically…
According to a working paper by Greenstone and Nigam (2020), the answer is a resounding yes! …we project that moderate social distancing would save 1.7 million lives between March 1 and October 1, with 630,000 due to avoided overwhelming of hospital intensive care units. Using the projected age-specific reductions in death and age-varying estimates of…
MIT Technology Review has an interesting profile of Amy Finkelstein, an MIT professor and one of my favorite health economists. [Full disclosure: I’ve never met Amy Finkelstein, I just enjoy her research]. The article is interesting throughout, but below I excerpt a sidebar showing 8 things that we know about health economics due to Finkelstein’s…
Let’s say you have a new health care treatment. How much is someone willing to pay for it? One way to find out is with a first price sealed-bid auction. In this type of auction, you ask people how much they pay and if they have the highest bid, they get the item. In this…
Janet Currie has a nice review article (Currie 2020) in Health Economics covering this topic. She summarizes the literature as follows: In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research demonstrating that child health is an important form of human capital. Healthier children live longer and healthier lives, get more education, and…
The Economist has an interesting series of article (here and here) on covid-19, the new WHO name of the corona virus. One key issue is how strict containment efforts should be. These decisions are being made not just based on the potential to impact the health of a country’s population but also economic and political…