Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Perhaps at least according to Tyler Cowen. Here is an excerpt from his Conversation with Dan Wang: WANG: …health care is what, 20% of the American GDP?COWEN: 17 point something. That’s a lot, right?WANG: That’s a lot. That feels too high to me. I feel like we should be ringing better efficiencies out here.COWEN: It seems not high enough,…
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…
…is large. At least according to a recent paper by Graham and Mujcic (2025). The focus of the paper is on the on the long term health, emotional and economic impacts of having a hopeful attitude. Hope has agentic properties which are relevant to people’s future outcomes. Following 25,000 randomly sampled Australian adults over a…
That is the title of my guest column at The Evidence Base. An excerpt is below: Multiple indicators suggest that health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) faces unprecedented challenges to its traditional role in pharmaceutical value demonstration. Yet these apparent threats may signal evolution rather than decline – if the field can adapt to serve…
Recently I read the book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Why nations fail is of course is a very important question, but one economists often shy away from because it is so multifaceted. In this book, however, the authors argue that one sufficient…
From Hwang, Jakob and Squires (2025) in AER: Insights: Cousin marriage rates are high in many countries today. While previous studies have documented increased risks of infant and child mortality, we provide the first estimate of the effect of such marriages on life expectancy throughout adulthood. By studying couples married over a century ago, we…
Does Medicare Part B increase or decrease the prices of physician-administered drugs relative to physician-administered drugs covered by private insurance? That is the question a paper by Acquatella, Ericson and Starc (2023) aim to answer. Before we answer that question, we first need to understand how Part B works, how physicians are reimbursed, and how…
There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
Most health economists people know quality adjusted life years (QALYs) are. But why are they so widely used in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States? A paper by MacKillop and Sheard (2018) provides an interesting history of the QALY and is worth a read. For QALYs to be useful there first had…
On this blog we most often talk about health care issues related to chronic and acute conditions, health behaviors and public health. However, there is another dimension that is vital to health: avoiding natural disasters. Unfortunately, natural disasters appear to having an increasing impact in the US across the past decades. Between 1980-2024, 16,941 people…