Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS’) Prescription Drug Consumer Price Index (CPI‐Rx) looks at price changes for drugs dispensed at outpatient retail pharmacies. However, many pharmaceuticals–especially infusions and injections–are administered at physician offices or hospitals. How would including physician-administered drugs impact the CPI-Rx? That is the question a paper by Hicks, Berndt and Frank (2024)…
Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory posit that individuals have loss aversion. What is loss aversion? It means that individuals experience losses more intensely than gains of the same magnitude; for instance, the psychological impact of losing a certain amount of money is greater than the pleasure derived from gaining that same amount. A key question…
Cohen (2024) argues that health economists should start using 2% discount rates for health economic models. Why is that? I summarize the article below. First, Cohen discusses two different methods for estimating discount rates. Ramsey equation. This approach consider 4 factors: pure time preference, catastrophic risk, wealth effect, and macroeconomic risk. The first 3 factors…
Very interesting article from Sampson, Parkin and Devlin (2024). Hard to summarize but worth a read. I have two excerpts below. The first describes the role of death in QALY calculations. The value attributed to ‘dead’ cannot affect the QALYs that are gained in any context; by definition, no QALYs can be generated by a…
From Habla et al. (2024): Using a representative survey with 1317 individuals and 12,815 moral decisions, we elicit Swedish citizens’ preferences on how algorithms for self-driving cars should be programmed in cases of unavoidable harm to humans. Participants’ choices in different dilemma situations (treatments) show that, at the margin, the average respondent values the lives…
Medical debt in the U.S. is a major problem. While over 90% of individuals have health insurance, many people are uninsured and even those with insurance may be liable to high deductibles and copayments. A Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) analysis uses data from Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and finds that: …20 million…
Congratulations to Philipp Strack who has won the 2024 John Bates Clark Medal. The John Bates Clark Medal is awarded annually each April to that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. The American Economic Association webpage has a nice…
Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman passed away today. His work incorporating psychology into economics through Prospect Theory has been a major advance. From the N.Y. Times obituary: Professor Kahneman delighted in pointing out and explaining what he called universal brain “kinks.” The most important of these, the behaviorists hold, is loss-aversion: Why, for example, does…
To answer this question, a paper by Nicholas et al. (2024) conducted a nationally representative experimental survey. The survey used a series of vignettes related to care decisions of hospitalized adults with dementia. These vignettes were cross-randomized along three dimensions (i) cognitive impairment, (ii) gender, and (iii) characteristics of advance care planning. Based on this…
These trends are summarized on their webpage and in a larger report. Here they are with some key excerpts from their report: Real world Evidence. “As RWE continues to gain significant traction in healthcare, agencies including the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the European Medicines Agency (EMA), The National Institute for Health and…