Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
Although the high cost of pharmaceuticals is often in the news, these costs are offset by improved health benefits. However, it may not be clear the extent to which new pharmaceutical products lead to improved health at the national level. A paper by Lichtenberg (2018) aims to examine this question looking at the introduction of…
An interesting article in the N.Y. Times “Upshot” section by Austin Frakt argues that federal efforts to nudge people towards healthier behaviors may be doomed to fail. A $100 billion dollar health care package…encourages exercise by treating gym memberships as tax-deductible medical expenses…[a]nd it would permit the use of flexible spending accounts and health savings accounts…
In recent years, a number of states have legalized medical marijuana. While marijuana may not be good for you, can it be used as a substitute for more dangerous substances such as prescription opioids and heroin? To use an analogy, perhaps marijuana is to vaping ans opioids/heroin are to smoking. In fact, a recent paper…
That is according to a recent article published in PNAS by Zhang, Zhang and Chen (2018). As reported in The Economist: …chronic exposure to pollution lowered the scores on the verbal tests, and that the higher the pollution levels were the more the scores dropped. On average, an increase of 13.23 units (one standard deviation) in…
The National Cancer Institute defines personalized medicine as “uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease”. In practice, however, patient treatment is rarely personalized by individual since evidence to support complete personalization is rarely available. Personalization in practice more often means care that varies with some individual characteristics.…
An interesting study from Kolodziej et al. (2018) using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. They aim to measure what happens to adults’ labor force participation when they provide informal care to their parents. To offset the problem of endogeneity, we exploit the availability of other potential caregivers within the family…
The Fourth of July is a fun holiday. We celebrate America’s independence, bar-b-que, and watch fireworks. I have many good memories watching the fireworks on July 3 (yes, in Milwaukee the largest fireworks display actually happens July 3). At the same time, the Fourth of July does have a number of health hazards to be…
A number of studies have suggested that we are spending too much on end of life care. Consider this Kwok et al. (2011) study published in Lancet. Many elderly people in the USA undergo surgery in the year before their death. The rate at which they undergo surgery varies substantially with age and region and…
As of 2015, only 8 percent of US adults ages thirty-five and older had received all of the high-priority, appropriate clinical preventive services recommended for them. Nearly 5 percent of adults did not receive any such services. This is from a recent Health Affairs paper by Borsky et al. (2018). This is despite the Affordable…