Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
It seems like everything just gets more and more expensive. But are prices for medical care declining? Cutler et al. (1998) found in seminal paper “Are medical prices declining? Evidence for heart attack treatments” that while unadjusted prices of medical care were in fact rising, quality-adjusted health care costs actually were falling. In my own…
Michael Grossman’s “Demand for Health” model turns 50 this year. To celebrate, Dr. Grossman himself provided some reflections in an article in Health Economics this month. He notes that the ‘Grossman model’ relies on two fundamental concepts: (i) health–not health care–enters into the utility function; health care services are chosen by individuals but these are…
Should physicians learn about health economics? The American Medical Association (AMA) thinks so. In a statement from 2019, the organization stated The American Medical Association (AMA) today adopted new policy expanding its efforts aimed at ensuring all medical students and residents receive training in health care economics. Building on the AMA’s ongoing work to transform…
As the COVID-19 pandemic struck, policymakers looked to researchers to both predict the future trend of the pandemic as well as examine how different policy options would impact society. Both epidemiologists and economists rose to the challenge, creating a variety of models to help inform policy decisions. How did the models developed by economists and…
That is the question answered in a paper by Autor et al. (2022). Some background on PPP: Congress enacted the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provided uncollateralized, low-interest loans of up to $10 million to firms with fewer than 500 employees—loans that were forgivable on the condition that recipient firms maintained employment and wages at…
In many markets, however, we observe that lower income individuals do not purchase the most generous forms of health insurance. For instance, despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act–which provided subsidies to lower income individuals to purchase relatively generous insurance–some individuals preferred the less generous Association Health Plans (AHPs) also known as “skinny” health…
This is something I knew very little about and thus Bald et al. (2022) NBER working paper was fascinating to read. They describe the key tension of foster care: failing to put at risk children in foster care may expose them to abuse or neglect; however putting too many at risk children into foster care…
The 2022 winner of the John Bates Clark medal is Oleg Itskhoki. Each year, the medal goes to the American economist under the age of 40 who made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. Below is a summary of his research from the American Economic Association (AEA) website. One key finding is…
Based on analysis from National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs), multifactor productivity (MFP) in the health care and social assistance sector declined by 0.4% per between 1987 and 2018. On the other hand, the economy as a whole experience a 0.9% increase in MFP. With new technology, telehealth, gene therapies, treatments going generic, is it…
According to a paper by Rodriguez et al. (2022), the answer is ‘yes’. They use data from the 2017–18 National Survey of Healthcare Organizations and Systems (NSHOS), to determine if a physician practice has a “robust set of care management capabilities.” The specific capabilities that were used to determine whether the health system was robust…