Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Times of London reports (“…no surgery until you quit“) that smokers who needed surgery “…would not be added to waiting lists until they had given up smoking.” While there is vast medical evidence that shows the hazards of smoking as well as the fact that smoking reduces recovery time from surgery, should we really…
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), there is an interesting article about public health interventions to combat influenza epidemics. These nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) include closure of schools, churches, and theaters. The authors find the following results: “…cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had…
A recent Health Economics article by Adam Wagstaff gives a good comparison of five East Asian countries: Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. While Japan (1961), Korea (1989) and Taiwan (1995) have introduced universal health insurance, Singapore and Honk Kong have not. Singapore began using medical savings account (MSAs) in 1984, but MSAs only…
Tyler Cowen has interesting piece in The New York Times (“Abolishing the Middlemen…“) in which he states that a single-payer system’s cost savings from the reduced administrative and overhead cost may be illusory. The article’s arguments are sound and are similar to the one’s I made in the post titled “Medicare’s (true) Administrative Costs.” The…
Consumer-directed health plans (CDHP) have been a topic of much interest in the United States of late. In order to increase competition between health plans, in 1996 the German government began a program to allow consumers to have a free choice of their social health insurers plan. Since the federal government sets a high minimum…
Many studies have looked at which variables determine medical utilization rates. Specifically, most of the studies have focused on primary care or general practitioner (GP) visits. A recent study by Nolan (2007) employs panel data from Ireland to reach some new conclusions on this topic. Ireland is an interesting location to preform the study. All…
How do medical care costs respond to different coinsurance rates? The RAND Health Insurance Experiment (Manning, et al. AER 1987) demonstrated that moral hazard is problem; individuals with lower coinsurance rates tend to use more medical services. In 1935, Kozo Nagase formulated a mathematical heuristic to describe how coinsurance rates affected medical expenditures in Japan.…
A recent NBER working paper by Banks, Marmot, Oldfield and Smith looks at the health outcomes and Socio-Economic Status (SES) of white males between the ages of 55 and 64 in the U.S. and in England. The authors use data from the American Health and Retirement Study (HRS), Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest…
In an interesting article, the Gooznews website asks “How good is your primary care physician?” The answer, at least for the U.S., is not so good. Referencing a 2006 Health Affairs survey of primary care physicians in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Gooznews cites the slow…
Having a safe and reliable water supply is a prerequisite for longevity. In China’s arid northern region, procuring water has always been a problem. In this week’s Economist, the magazine reports (“A modest proposal“) on some of China’s latest efforts to bring water to this region. The Chinese have already been hard at work diverting…