Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
About a year ago (“Attention Shoppers“), this blog noted the rapid expansion of walk-in health clinics staffed by nurse practitioners. This week, the Economist magazine (“McClinics“) highlights growing popularity of walk-in clinics such as RediClinic, MinuteClinic, and Health Stop. Patients appreciate the convenient locations, shorter wait times, and lower costs. More information can be found…
A frequent topic of investigation in health economics is to estimate the elasticity of the demand for medical procedures with respect to wait times. A paper by Martin, Rice, Jacobs and Smith in the Journal of Health Economics uses quarterly data from 200 English hospitals between 1995-2002 in order to separately estimate the supply and…
In a recent NBER working paper (“Tradeoffs“), authors Christopher Afendulis and Daniel Kessler, pose an interesting question: should the physician who is diagnosing you also be the one who provides treatment? On the one hand, a physician who both diagnoses and provides treatment has a financial incentive to recommend to the patient that they should…
An interesting post by Arnold Kling (“Doctors, Pharmaceuticals, and Statisticians“) reports on a randomized clinical trial which demonstrated that on average, angioplasties have no incremental health benefits once the patient is placed on multiple medications such as beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, statins and blood thinners. Dr. Kling writes: “Doctors think that they add value by giving…
Approximately one year ago today, I wrote about whether or not non-profit hospitals should be tax exempt (“Should Non-Profit Hospitals get a Tax Break?“). Generally, I concluded that they should not. Flash forward to March 2007 and we see that The New York Times has an article titled “In Shriner Spending, A Blurry Line of…
This week on NPR’s “Fresh Air” radio program is an interesting interview with Dr. Jerome Groopman. Dr. Groopman has recently written a book titled How Doctors Think. The interview is available at the NPR website, but below I have a brief excerpt from the book. “This book is about what goes on in a doctor’s…
Today, I will review an interesting article by Glied and Zivin (2002) examining how physicians adjust their practice style when the HMO share of patients changes (note: the authors implicitly assume all HMOs pay physicians via capitation). First we will look at the three theoretical models the authors develop. Models 1. Excess capacity model. The…
In The Social Transformation of American Medicine, author Paul Starr analyzes the development of modern American medicine. A large portion of the book looks at the roots of physician licensure. His analysis dates back to the colonial era. Some important turning points in the history of physician licensure before the twentieth century are: In the…
Today I will be briefly be reviewing four recent articles which examine how physician payment methods affect the amount of medical service provision. GP reimbursement in Ireland Madden, Nolan and Nolan (Health Econ 2005) use a quasi-experimental framework to see how changing physician compensation affects the number of doctors visits. In Ireland approximately 30% of…
One final example of licensure’s impact on quality is given by a 1978 study of the quality of contact lens fitting. The study looked at 502 households who had been fitted for contacted lenses in the previous three years and were still wearing contacts. The study was conducted with the cooperation of the American Academy…