Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Recently, the Office of Management and Budget has released new procedures to assess government regulation (Circular A-4) and economic policies (Circular A-94). What is unique about this guidance is that it weights benefits and costs of new regulations and policies based on the income of the individuals impacted. The goal is to help reduce inequality.…
Are wealthier people healthier? If so, how strong is this relationship? Does it vary across countries? That is what a paper by Kyriopoulos et al. 2024 aims to answer. They measure health and wealth using a “concentration index” (CI) which is calculated as follows: CI is estimated with reference to the concentration curve, which illustrates…
Interesting paper by Cabral and Dillender (2024). The randomization of gender assignment occurs since the Texas workers compensation insurance relies on random assignment of doctors to patients through their dispute resolution process. The abstract is below: Little is known about what drives gender disparities in health care and related social insurance benefits. Using data and…
A paper by Gupta and Akinyemiju (2024) uses SEER data to examine trends in age-adjusted cancer mortality between blacks and whites between 2000 and 2020. The authors find that: In 2000, the [age-adjusted mortality] rate was 251.7 per 100 000 population among Black individuals and 199.7 per 100 000 population among White individuals, decreasing to 166.8 per…
That is the title of a paper currently published (well, in pre-prints) at Value in Health. Co-authors include Jaehong Kim, Moises Marin MA, Sangeetha Ramsagar, Mark Lloyd Davies, Kyana Stewart, Iftekhar Kalsekar and Anil Vachani. The abstract is below: ObjectiveTo measure the value of increasing lung cancer screening rates for high-risk individuals and its impact…
Many health policy experts–including myself–have noted that treatments that help reduce health disparities may be especially valuable whereas those that exacerbate inequalities may be somewhat less valuable than predicted by standard cost-effectiveness analysis. A key question is, health disparities over what dimension(s)? Is it race? Income? Education? O’Nell et al. (2013) developed the PROGRESS framework.…
There are many studies that show that social determinants of health (SDOH) impact health outcomes. A more challenging question is how do SDOH impact health outcomes? Specifically, through what pathways or mechanisms do SDOH operate? A paper by Thimm-Kaiser (2023) identifies 8 mechanisms through which SDOH impact outcomes. These include: SDOH are underlying causes of…
That is the question a paper by Anirban Basu (2023) in Science Advances attempts to answer. A key assumption the article makes is that race is a social and not a biological construct. Basu justifies this assumption by stating that “the vast majority of genetic variation associated with race-specific traits exists within racial groups and…
A paper by Saulsberry et al. (2023) argues that the Social Vulnerability Metric (SVM) is an improvement over previous social determinants of health (SDOH) measures such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). SVI uses census tract level data to construct overall community rankings based on variables included in four themes: “Socioeconomic Status” including percentages below…
An interesting study from Masters et al. (2023): Induction of labor (IOL) rates in the United States have nearly tripled since 1990. We examine official U.S. birth records to document increases in states’ IOL rates among pregnancies to Black, Latina, and White women. We test if the increases are associated with changes in demographic characteristics…