Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Much of the discussions of the pros and cons of single payer systems are ideological. Single payer advocates will say they are fair, potentially can leverage economies of scale, and more equitable. Single payer opponents will argue that they are inefficient, and restrict choice. An interesting paper from Tomoki Fuji (2018), shows that the answer…
A recent report from Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) found that for about 30 physician administered drugs, prices are 8 times as high as those charged in other developed countries. To address the high prices, President Trump unveiled a three-part plan to reduce drug prices. Under the “international pricing index” proposal, U.S. drug…
Darius Lakdawalla has an very interesting review article in the Journal of Economic Literature on the Economics of the pharmacuetical industry. Do read the whole thing, but below I have listed some highlights. A model of firm R&D decisions Lakdawalla uses a simple model based on Nordhaus (1969) to derive some important implications about pharmaceutical…
The title of this post comes from a speech from Columbia health policy and management professor Lawrence Brown. For years, Presidents and other politicians have noted that rising health care costs will lead to the collapse of the system. Michael Millenson highlights this state of unending crisis in his Health Affairs blog post titled “Half A…
How are public and private insurance used in the real-world? The answer to this question varies across countries, however, there are generally 3 ways in which public and private health insurance systems interact. First, private insurance may substitute for public insurance. That is, people are either covered privately or publicly. This is the case 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.…
Competition matters for markets…even health care markets. A paper by Van Parys (2018) relies on a database of plan premium and market characteristics among states with federally-facilitated health insurance exchange Marketplaces. In this analysis, she finds that: In 2018, Marketplace premiums were 50 percent ($180) higher, on average, in rating areas with monopolist insurers, compared…
In June of this year, CBO laid out the projected fiscal health of the federal budget over the coming decades in their 2018 Long Term Budget Outlook report. This report project’s “extended baseline” scenarios that assume that all laws on the books will be implemented as written. For instance, if there is a spending bill…
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…
Medicare provides health insurance for 58.4 million Americans. To provide health care to largely elderly Americans, it spent $710 billion in 2017. One key question is, does the federal government have the funds to continue to support this program as the baby boomers retire? According to the 2018 Medicare Trustees report, the answer is increasingly…