Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In her California Healthcare Foundation report, Katherine Wilson does a nice job describing the health insurance market in California. A little over health of individuals received health care from their employer or themselves (56%), a quarter of individuals receive health insurance through public programs, and 19% of Californians are uninsured (see chart). The private health…
Everyone knows that health insurance is getting more and more expensive. But how can we measure how expensive it is? A paper by UC-San Diego professors Richard Kronick and Todd Gilmer creates an “affordability index” to measure this. The affordability index is equal to the per-capita, non-elderly health spending divided by the median income. In…
Since the early 1980s, age-adjusted cancer mortality rates have been falling over time. Is this due to better screening, better treatment, or healthier behavioral factors? Is this progress cost-effective? Are we really winning the war on cancer? A paper by Culter (2008) tries to answer this question. First it is important to note that there…
Wisconsin’s Medicaid plan covers children from 0-5 years old whose parents have income below 150% of the poverty line. Sixty percent of Massachusetts residence receive coverage through their employer compared to 53% nationwide. Forty-six percent of Californian firms with less than 50 employees offer health insurance compared to the national average of 43%. How did…
Accidental injuries kill more than 2,000 children per day worldwide. The December 22, 2008 edition of Time lists the leading causes of accident-related childhood deaths worldwide: Other unintentional: 31.1% Road-traffic injuries: 22.3% Drowning: 16.8% Fire-related injuries: 9.1% Homicide: 5.8% Self-inflicted injuries: 4.4% Falls: 4.2% Poisoning: 3.9% War: 2.3%
There are now 33 million people living with HIV, including 2 million children. About 2.7 million people became newly infected with the virus each year. Combating this epidemic is one of the top priorities facing public health workers around the world. With limited resources, what strategy should be pursued? As of now, a vaccine…
Google searches as a public health resource: Google.org has released Flu Trends, an online reporting tool for flu-related search activity. It’s long been theorized that Google’s search data would be useful to predict epidemics. This is the first time they’ve released a tool like this to the public. As they say on the main page: We have found a…
According to Health Affairs, the U.S. spent 16.0% of GDP on health expenditures in 2006. What will we be spending on health care in 2040? Robert Fogel takes a stab at answering this question. He claims that by 2040, the U.S. will spend 29% of GDP on health care in 2040. There are four…
Jonathan Gruber (2008) has a nice review article in the most recent edition of the Journal of Economic Literature. This article is especially good for those who are not schooled in the basic issues of the uninsured. It is also useful for professors wishing to teach students about the uninsured in America. The article reviews…
Economists generally define efficiency in two manners: productive efficiency and allocative efficiency. Productive efficiency means producing a good or service using fewest inputs. A car company who produces a car that costs $20,000 to manufacture is less efficient than a company that can produce that same car (at the same quality) at a cost of…