Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
According to the U.S. Census: Both the percentage and number of people without health insurance decreased in 2007. The percentage without health insurance was 15.3 percent in 2007, down from 15.8 percent in 2006, and the number of uninsured was 45.7 million, down from 47.0 million. The percentage of people covered by private health insurance…
Below is a side-by-side comparison of health care and economic statistics from China and India. Category China India Population 1.33 billion 1.15 billion Life Expectancy (2008) 73.18 69.25 Infant Mortality Rate (per 1000 live births) 21.16 32.31 GDP (PPP) – 2007 $6.99 billion $2.99 trillion GDP/capita (PPP) – 2007 $5,300 $2,700 GDP growth – 2007…
The Kaiser Fast Facts website is a useful tool for any health researchers who need basic statistical information regarding medical care in the U.S. The numerous slides filled with information-filled charts and graphs.
For many years price increases in the medical sector has outpaced overall inflation by a significant amount. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here is the increase in consumer prices over the last few years. Year Medical CPI CPI Δ 2001 4.7 1.6 3.1 2002 5.0 2.4 2.6 2003 3.7 1.9 1.8 2004 4.2…
How much money do you need to save for retirement? $100,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? $5,000,000? Well whatever your figure is, you need to tack on an extra quarter of a million dollars in order to cover your health care costs in retirement. The Boston Globe (“Fidelity…“) reports that Fidelity now estimates that a couple will…
The simple answer for this is that calorie intake is higher than the number of calories burned. But why are people getting fatter? In which countries are people the fattest? This is the questioned tackle in a working paper by Sara Bleich and colleagues “Why is the Developed World Obese?” Obesity is a serious disease:…
An amazing collection of data has been performed by van Doorslaer et al. in their 2007 Health Economics paper “Catastrophic Payments for Health Care in Asia.” For 14 Asian countries, the authors categorize all charged services, free services, and income-related fee waivers. Further the paper examines the frequency and magnitude of out-of-pocket payments for medical…