Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
“I will maintain that there is no comparably important question in economics, because this is the question of human progress. This is the question of human wellbeing over millennia. Everything else about resource allocation, about policy, about macro…everything else is a footnote to this larger question of how new things come into being and how…
That is the title of a Journal of Economic Perspectives article by Martin Gaynor and Amanda Starc (2026). The article provides an overview of the current levels of competition in US health insurance markets, considers theoretic issues in what levels of competition are optimal, what empirical studies have found of the impact of competition and…
That is the title of a recent white paper written by myself and Kristy Piccinini alongside a team from the Health and Fitness Association (Greta Wagner, Amy Bantham, Ken Griffin, Richard Beddie, Zach Weston, Cameron Saunders). Below is an excerpt: In recent years, glucagon-like-peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists have emerged as a transformative treatment option, enabling…
When health economics emerged as a distinct discipline in the late 1960s, mainstream academic and policy paradigms widely presumed that competitive market mechanisms were structurally incompatible with medical delivery. Influenced by foundational ideas like Kenneth Arrow’s 1963 landmark paper emphasizing the pervasive friction of clinical uncertainty, early experts argued that society had to look almost…
That is the title of my latest column in The Evidence Base. In this latest edition of Perspectives from the Healthcare Economist, Jason Shafrin (FTI Consulting and Mann School of Pharmacy, University of Southern California) examines how AI is beginning to reshape health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), from evidence generation and literature reviews to data analysis…
That is the question Luis Garicano asks in his recent post. He relies on projections from the 2025 IMF World Economic Outlook. On the positive side, Eastern European countries’ economies are likely to converge with the US. While we have spent a decade complaining about Europe’s stagnation, a real positive convergence story has been unfolding…
From Charlie Bilello: Healthcare and Social Assistance have added nearly 1.8 million private-sector jobs in the US since the end of 2023 while all of other industries combined have lost 127,800 jobs.
From a Topaz et al. (2026) paper in The Lancet reviewing citations across 2.5 peer-reviewed papers in PubMed: Among 97·1 million verified references, we identified 4046 fabricated references across 2810 papers (illustrative examples are shown in the appendix p 5–6). In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025,…
Stuart Figueroa provides some insights in his Incidental Economist article: To start, price shopping is inconvenient. It requires the consumer to invest time and energy in finding a provider, oftentimes having to navigate provider directories that are inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated. Price shopping is also hampered by the mere fact that health insurance is complicated and…
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…