Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How will HEOR leaders respond to recent policy changes? A survey from Tufts and the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) provides the answer. About 2/3 of the n=57 respondents were Head of their HEOR department and the remaining 1/3 had some other senior level HEOR role. Whereas 29.8% of…
That is the title of a recent paper by Schneider and Sutter (2026). While many people are familiar with the concept of risk aversion, the dispersion of outcomes (i.e., risk) is not the only thing that matters. The skewness of distribution (prudence) and risk in the tails of the distribution (temperance) matters. For instance, prudent…
That is the title of a helpful article by Karnon and Haji Ali Afzali (Pharmacoeconomics 2014) with a subtitle A Review and Critique of the Costs and Benefits of DES. The paper starts by highlighting the 3 most common types of models: decision trees, Markovian cohort models, and individual level models. Decisions trees are useful…
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…