Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Out recently is an interesting AEA paper by Okeke 2023, who examines a policy experiment by the Nigerian government that aimed determine whether expand access to physicians improved health outcomes. In this experiment, some communities were randomly selected to receive a new doctor. These doctors were posted to the local public health center. Prior to…
The value of medical devices caries with it less certainty than pharmaceuticals for a variety of reasons. As described in Kovács et al. (2022) medical devices: often have multiple applications, frequently, undergo product modifications and during their product lifecycle, multiple incremental technological innovations take place affecting both clinical and economic consequences of their adoption into…
How well do different countries take care of their elderly and near elderly populations? A study by Macinko et al. (2020) provides some useful statistics. Methods Population of interest. Individuals aged 50 and above sampled across 23 high- and middle-income countries. Data. The data come from 2015 or 2016 years for the following data sets:…
If you are hurt and can’t work to make money, what do you do? In most countries, disabled individuals are eligible for disability insurance. However, the rate of individuals who claim disability insurance varies greatly across countries. Is this largely due to differences in country population characteristics or disability policy generosity? This is the question…
Health technology assessments (HTAs) aim to measure the cost effectiveness of a given treatment or set of treatments for a specific patient populations. Often, these assessments are conducted from the point of view of the payer–either a national health system or the individual insurer perspective. This payer focused perspective can often focus largely on treatment costs rather…
There has been a lot of criticism of drug prices in the U.S. One person not included the chorus of critics is Bill Gates. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said: “The current system is better than most other systems one can imagine,” Gates said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “The drug companies are…
Malaysia is a middle income country (GDP per capita $26,600, about half of U.S. income levels) of 30.5 million people (about the population of New York and Ohio combined). Life expectancy is 74.75 years, just 5 years below the U.S. Health spending in Mayalsia is only 4% of GDP (compared to 17% of GDP in…
Both the stimulus bill (i.e., The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [ARRA]) and Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act [ACA]) contain provisions to increase funding for compariative effectiveness research (CER). According to a Deloitte Issue Brief, ARRA provided the foundation for the ACA’s newly mandated and immediately effective CER entity, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute…
Thomas Schael, ex-commissioner at the Public Health Authority of Naples, led the implementation of a system that produced annual drug expenditure savings of €20m. How did he do it? Eye for Pharma has a revealing two–part interview. The first thing Schael did to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals in Italy was to improve the efficiency…
What is health insurance like in China? A 2011 paper by Zhong in Health Economics provides a nice overview, which I discuss in today’s post. Between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, three primary insurance schemes covered almost all Chinese citizens. Cooperative Medical System (CMS). This program existed in 90% of Chinese villages. …