Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The U.S. has a gun problem. A paper by Goldstick et al. (2019) use data from the CDC’s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) tool and find that: Rates of firearm homicides, suicides, and unintentional deaths in the US are 25.2, 8.0, and 6.2 times higher, respectively, than rates in other developed countries… There…
Most people who spend time in health care are aware of the opioid crisis. But how bad is it really? The National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation provides a number of interactive graphs to quantitatively describe how the opioid crisis has evolved between 2000 and 2017. For instance, the the graph below shows…
Some positive news as reported in The Economist: On August 21st Nigeria marked three years since its last documented case of wild polio. That means the country is set to be declared polio-free by the World Health Organisation-backed Global Polio Eradication Initiative. If that happens, probably next year, all of Africa will be officially free…
A paper by Frew and Breheny (2019), aimed to answer this question by conducting a Delphi Panel of English and Welsh decision makers who allocated funding for public health for local government. Unsurprisingly, cost, health outcomes and quality of life were the most important factors. Beyond these top 3 factors, interventions’ impact on productivity and…
Louisiana has already begun adopting a “Netflix” pricing model to pay for Hepatitis C treatments. Rather than pay per treatment, Louisiana would pay a flat rate per month to access as many Hepatitis C treatments as they need. The benefit of this is (i) states have predictable budgets and (ii) manufacturers have predicable revenues. This…
Not surprisingly, the answer is yes, but not by as much as one might guess. In part due to a measles outbreak at Disneyland, California outlawed non-medical exemptions for vaccinations. An NBER working paper by Richwine et al. (2019) provides background on the situation in California prior to enacting the ban. Prior to the policy…
According to a paper this month in Value in Health from Anupam Bapu Jena, Julia Thornton Snider, Oliver Diaz Espinosa, Andy Ingram, Yuri Sanchez Gonzalez and Darius Lakdawalla, the answer is ‘yes’. The authors look at how curing chronic hepatitis C affects the likelihood of getting a liver, lung, heart, or kidney transplant for individuals…
This is the key question we are left with after some startling news from a startling article from Oren et al. in JAMA. Using data from the CDC Underlying Cause of Death database between 2000 and 2017, they find that: The suicide rate at ages 15 to 19 years and 20 to 24 years increased…
According to a news report in The Globe and Mail, one of the primary reasons for falling life expectancy in Canada is the opioid epidemic. Life expectancy in Canada has stopped increasing for the first time in more than four decades, due largely to soaring overdose deaths in the Western provinces. In British Columbia, the…
In the news, deaths from overdoses of opioids, heroin and fentanyl have been in the spotlight. Rightly so. Opioid deaths in the U.S have risen to almost 50,000 people in 2017, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. However, deaths from methamphetamines is on the rise as well. In fact, many individuals who die…