Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
One reason for worse health outcomes for racial minorities could be reduced access to pharmacies. However, how big a problem is pharmacy access? A recent Health Affairs paper by Guadamuz et al. (2021) uses 2007-2015 data from the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) to identify pharmacies, which were then geocoded and linked to…
If you want to implement value-based care, you need to define what a ‘good’ outcome is. A good outcome may be different for different individuals. For instance, if you look at mortality rates for a given disease, it makes sense that individuals age 80 and above will have higher mortality rates than those 20-29 year…
That is the finding from a study published by Anne Case and Angus Deaton this week in Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). While COVID-19 has had a clear impact in the last 12 months, in fact figures from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) indicate that American life expectancy peaked in…
On the eve of Martin Luther King Day, let us take a quick look at the impact of COVID-19 by race/ethnicity. CDC reports rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. One can see that cases are higher for most minorities (except Asians) relative to Non-Hispanic Whites, but hospitalizations and deaths are much higher for all…
Bütikofer and Salvanes (2020) in The Review of Economic Studies: This article examines the economic impact of a tuberculosis control program launched in Norway in 1948. In the 1940s, Norway had one of the highest tuberculosis infection rates in Europe, affecting about 85% of the inhabitants. To lower the disease burden, the Norwegian government launched…
The Milwaukee Bucks–my home town sports team–yesterday boycotted Game 5 of their NBA playoff series. This historical event serves to bring attention to the inequalities African-Americans and other minorities face in our society. In health care, disparities also exist. As I mentioned in my Health Affairs blog piece with Meena Venkatachalam, COVID-19 has highlighted these…
Azar et al. (2020) use electronic health record data to examine differences in COVID-19 hospitalization rates by patient characteristics. The authors find that: …compared with non-Hispanic white patients, nonHispanic African American patients had 2.7 times the odds of hospitalization, after adjustment for age, sex, comorbidities, and income. These findings echo similar COVID-19-related conclusions across California.…