Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Kapoor et al. (2020) uses rainfall on last weekend before the stay-at-home order as an instrument for social distancing. variables. They find that social distancing works and has persistent effects, especially early on: We test whether earlier social distancing affects the progression of a local COVID-19 outbreak. We exploit county-level rainfall on the last weekend…
Today, the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds released their 2020 report on the financial status of both programs (report, summary). The numbers don’t look good. I say this noting also that the projections do not take into account any impacts on mortality, health care costs and taxes revenue from COVID-19. Thus,…
I have written about the 340b program a number of times on this blog in the past (e.g., “The 340B Program: An Overview“, “340B Facts and Figures“). A new commentary by Thomas and Schulman (2020) in Health Services Research provides some additional information. For instance, why was 340B originally enacted? Blame the Medicaid Drug Rebate…
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act has been passed by the Senate and signed by the President. There are mixed opinions about this specific bill, but certainly a bailout/relief package of some size was needed. What is in the package? The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) has a nice visualization.
Janet Currie has a nice review article (Currie 2020) in Health Economics covering this topic. She summarizes the literature as follows: In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research demonstrating that child health is an important form of human capital. Healthier children live longer and healthier lives, get more education, and…
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized drugs. What does that mean? How did it health outcomes, incarcerations, drug trafficking and other outcomes? A post by Liam Bendicksen at Incidental Economist reviews the literature. The first thing to understand is what decriminalization in Portugal did and did not do. …drug reforms decriminalized possession up to “the quantity required…
As of January 30, 2020, President Trump has an overall approval rating of 42.8% according to 538. He has a disapproval rating of 52.8% leading to a net rating of -10% Yet this overall number may hide heterogeneity in what people think. Maybe public opinion of President Trump is more favorable on some issues than…
Andrew Yang, Democratic candidate for President, is running largely on a platform of the “Freedom Dividend“. The Freedom Dividend is a $1000 monthly payment to ever American adult. The goal is to reduce inequality and provide some liquidity for low-income individuals to start a business, or have more work-life flexibility. This approach–a form of Universal…
How do you measure the value of new drugs? An organization known as the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review relies almost exclusively on Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY)-based framework. While that is a good start, many new treatments may have impacts beyond directly on health including on educational outcomes, productivity, caregiver burden. Further, society is…
Last week I reviewed a paper the sought to understand why people don’t buy health insurance. A key finding was that there health insurance purchase was correlated with income, but not perfectly. One reason was that the cost of other goods–especially housing–affected individuals ability to purchase insurance. The paper was getting at whether health insurance…