Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
One idea is to provide additional funding for both formal and informal caregiving services. For instance, one could subsidize nursing homes or home health agencies on the formal side; for informal caregiving, one could give stipends to individuals to care for their elderly parents. The question is, does this implementation actually work? This is the…
Clearly, the answer is no. It is best not to smoke at all. From a policy perspective, however, there is a question of whether e-cigarettes should be regulated and taxed heavily–like regular cigarettes–or more lightly. If e-cigarettes are relatively healthier than standard cigarettes, less taxes/regulation would be merited. If, however, e-cigarettes induce more individuals to…
Many people have heard of evidence-based medicine (EBM). A perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine by Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, however, tries to define what evidence-based health policy (EBHP) is. They list three key criteria: Policies need to be well-specified. For instance, “expand Medicaid coverage” is too general, whereas specifying that benefit package A…
Using Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project data between 1997 and 2014, Tedesco et al. (2017) find that–like many other studies–that the opioid epidemic has exploded in the last two decades. [Inpatient] discharge rates for prescription opioid poisoning increased significantly by 8.0 percent annually from 1997 to 2010 in the inpatient setting and 5.0 percent annually from…
The thought that health is a form of capital goes way back to the 19th century. Max von Pettenkofer compares health and economics and health states with capital in the following quotation: Just as the effort to obtain greater profits, an not merely fear of losses, is the driving force in economics, so too it…
As an economist, I would say “of course”! Increasing the price (the reward for weight loss) generally leads to an increase in supply (of efforts to lose weight). However, there is evidence that in some cases, adding a financial incentive can actually reduce effort. For instance, Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini (2000) found that adding…
Previous research has found that losing your job has an adverse effect on your physical and mental health. Because losing your job is endogenous, often studies of this sort look at plant closures as an individual’s job loss is largely uncorrelated with individual performance. An interesting paper by Schiele and Schmitz (2016) take this a step…
According to two researchers, the answer is no. As they write at Stat: As we wrote recently in Science, three key barriers are impeding the drive toward truly transformational precision medicine: researchers often don’t rigorously test the biological theories that supposedly explain why a targeted treatment should work; they haven’t fully determined the accuracy of the diagnostic…
According to a recent study by Koulayev, Simeonova, and Skipper (2016) using data from Denmark, the answer is ‘yes’. Non-compliance with medication therapy remains an unsolved and expensive problem for healthcare systems around the world, yet we know little about the factors that affect a patient’s decision to follow treatment recommendations. In particular, there is…
Kaiser’s family of website has some interesting posts of late. The Kaiser Family Foundation presents 10 Essential Facts about Medicare Prescription Drug Spending. They show the increasing price of U.S. prescription drugs spending over time. They also show that many patients with Medicare Part D, still bear a large share of prescription drug costs for…