Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Nobel laureate William Nordhaus claimed that climate change is “the ultimate challenge for economics.” One could say that climate change poses a serious challenge for the health economist as well. Climate change could have negative impact on health across a variety of dimensions including: Increased pollution has negative impacts on respiratory diseaes The increased increased…
That is a quote from a recent report by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) titled: “ALL IN: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness.” It is clear that homelessness causes poor health. Life expectancy for the average American is 77 years, but people who have experienced homelessness it is only…
When valuing new health technologies, we mostly focus on how these technologies improve patient health. However, there may be additional impacts. For instance, the treatment may improve your health such that you are able to return to work or become more productivity at work. How can we measure this additional value? Two common approaches are…
Using 2001-2016 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys (MEPS) data from working adults, a paper by Cawley et al. (2021) find that: Adults with obesity in the United States compared with those with normal weight experienced higher annual medical care costs by $2,505 or 100%, with costs increasing significantly with class of obesity, from 68.4% for class…
Interesting graphic from the Visual Capitalist. Unsurprisingly health care spending increases on both a relative and absolute scale as people age. HT: The Browser.
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…