Category: Uncategorized

Traditional cost-effectiveness measures measures treatment value based on how it affects your health. Health is often decomposed into longevity (i.e., survival) and quality of life while alive. However, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued that improvements in one’s life should be based on capabilities (a.k.a. opportunities, freedoms, advantages) to perform desired tasks rather than more abstract…

Many of us who are patients have the unpleasant experience of navigating the complex world of drug utilization management. This includes determining what formulary tier a drug will be on, if there are any prior authorization requirements and what our copay will be. The burden also falls on physicians in that they need to justify…

Rise in mental health tele-visits. Inequality, conspicuous consumption and health expenditures. Treating serious illness at home. Why do scientists lie? BMI and income.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Mark Twain

How did COVID-19 affect mortality rates and how did that vary by racial and ethnic groups? Using January 2011 – April 2020 data from the Census Bureau’s version of the Social Security Administration’s Numerical Identification (Numident) database, a paper by Polyakova et al. (2021) find significantly higher all-cause excess mortality rates for minority groups, particularly…

A NBER working paper by Chandra et al. (2021) finds that even small levels of cost sharing have a major impact on pharmaceutical use and mortality. …we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in coinsurance, or $10.40 per drug) causes a 22.6% drop in total drug…

Last week, my Healthcare Economist blog celebrated its 15th year of existence. I started this blog in graduate school at UC-San Diego in January of 2016 with the very original inaugural post titled “Welcome!“. Since then, I’ve written more than 4,600 posts on various topics of in health and economics. Some of the most popular…

What insurance is better: private commercial health insurance or public health insurance? This is a more difficult question than it seems since individuals with commercial vs. public health insurance differ over a number of dimensions which affect health care spending, quality and outcomes. To try and get at this question, a paper by Allen et…

We know that COVID-19 has increased both mortality and morbidity around the world. But is there a systematic way of estimating the impact of COVID-19 on both mortality and morbidity. A paper by Briggs et al. (2021) proposes one simple solution. They start by creating standard life tables. Life tables are created by estimating the…

In short, because we had built years and years of previous science, particularly work related to another corona virus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus. As This American Life reports on the speed of vaccine development: That’s because the spike on this coronavirus that would cause the pandemic, it was very, very similar to…