Quotation of the Day
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Mark Twain
Category: Uncategorized
COVID-19 excess mortality by race
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…
Impact of pharmaceutical cost-sharing on health
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…
Healthcare Economist blog celebrates 15 years
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…
Health Insurance Battle Royal: Commercial vs. Medicaid
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…
Impact of COVID-19 on quality‐adjusted life‐year lost
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…
How did we get the COVID-19 vaccine so fast?
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…
What is the impact of FDA review time on pharmaceutical R&D investments?
This is the question that a recent paper by Chorniy et al. (2020) attempt to answer. This issue is clearly very relevant as the UK recently has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 before the US. Unlike most studies that attempt to examine the relationship between FDA review time and R&D investment dollars, the authors…
How much extra COVID-19 risk would you be willing to accept to open the economy?
That is the basic question that Reed et al. (2020) attempt to answer in their recent paper. The approach they use is as follows: We designed a discrete-choice experiment to administer 10 choice questions to each respondent representing experimentally controlled pairs of scenarios defined by when nonessential businesses could reopen (May, July, or October 2020),…
Longevity
Wouldn’t be great if we could find a treatment to improve longevity? Not just a treatment for a specific disease but one that could dramatically improve longevity for a large percentage of human kind. While there is a lot of longevity research going on and much progress has been made. There are some challenges. Milan…