Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
Catastrophic healthcare expenditures (CHE) are highly problematic for families are are unequally distributed throughout society. However, how can we quantify the incidence, intensity and inequality of CHE in a society? A paper by Ogwang and Mwabu (2025) provide one methodology by using the Watts poverty measure and adapting it to measure CHE. We first describe…
From an interesting review paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Craig Garthwaite: Although research and development investments clearly respond to market opportunities, the exact benefits created by these incremental investments remain unclear. This is largely because the exact marginal products developed in response to these incentives are elusive to identify. Certainly, the amount…
Suppose you have a single pill at your disposal and that pill will extend any person’s life by 10 years. You have to choose to give it to one of the following tow individuals: a 20‐year‐old patient, who will live for 10 more years if she gets the drug, and then she dies; a 70‐year‐old…
A paper by Daniotti et al. (2025) examines 80 million GitHub commits (2018–2024). The authors trained neural classifier to spot AI-generated Python functions in the GitHub code. As one can see below, nearly 1/3 of code in the US is being written by AI as of the end of 2024. US: 30.1% Germany: 24.3% France:…
That is the topic of a paper by Katherine Wagner (2022). The paper won the 2025 American Economic Journal: Economic Policy best papers award (despite being published 3 years ago). In her paper, Dr. Wagner uses data from 20 US Atlantic and Gulf Coast states between 2001 and 2017. Housing valuation data come from Zillow…
That is the title of a new USC white paper by Darren Filson, Karen Van Nuys, Darius Lakdawalla and Dana Goldman with the subtitle “How Much Does Revenue Drive New Drug Development?” What is the elasticity of innovation? It measures the percentage change in innovation—using the flow of new drugs approvals, or Phase 1, 2,…
This is the title of a recent paper by Jiao et al. (2025). Previous studies (e.g., Goldman et al. 2013, Goldman et al. 2023) have argued for a 3-part pricing model. Under a 3-part pricing model, drugs would come to market quickly under accelerated approval with a relatively lower price. As clinical trials and other…
Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) are commonly used to evaluate the impact of new medical technologies on patient mortality and morbidity. However, use of QALYs Many authors have discussed the fact that standard assumptions result in utility functions that are unrealistically linear and separable, overlooking the diminishing marginal utility a fundamental property of utility functions in…