Cavalcade of Risk is up
Matt Becker makes his CavRisk hosting debut with a tremendous collection of interesting posts and excellent commentary on each one at Mom and Dad Money.
Who pays for your Rx?
More and more its CMS (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid) or private insurance. Out-of-pocket spending for drugs is falling. Source: Deloitte. “Value-based pricing for pharmaceuticals: Implications of the shift from volume to value” Issue Brief, 2012.
Foreign-Educated Healthcare Workers
Many of the health care workers serving Americans were either born or educated abroad? Where do they come from? A paper by Chen et al. (2013) gives the answer. Top 5 countries for foreign educated physicians India: 20.4% Philippines: 8.1% Pakistan: 6.0% Mexico: 5.4% Dominican Republic: 3.2% Top 5 countries for foreign educated nurses (RNs)…
Measuring cause-specific mortality?
This question is not so easy to answer, even when using data from a randomized trial. Further, many studies do not have the statistical power to identify cause-specific mortality. Consider the following example from Kim and Thompson: Consider a trial of an intervention only influencing a single cause of death, or a few specific causes…
Friday Links
Reference pricing and the role of government. Rickets making a comeback in UK. Med school credit for Wikipedia entries? Why are UK housing prices so high? Obamacare gets real.
HWR is up
Brad Wright has posted a fresh edition of Health Wonk Review at his Wright on Health blog and you have to love the title: If You Like the Health Wonk Review You Currently Have, You Can Keep It.
UK to Pharma: Cut spending by 4%
Looks likes cuts to UK reimbursement rates for Pharma are on the way: People involved in the PPRS drug pricing talks have told the Financial Times on Tuesday, that drug companies operating in the UK have agreed the drugs bill to the NHS for their patented (but not generic drugs or vaccines) products will fall…
California’s Efforts to Aid the Homeless with SMI
Society often likes to ignore the challenges faced by citizens with serious mental illness (SMI), especially those who are homeless. California, however, has funded an initiative to help this vulnerable population. On November 2, 2004, California voters approved Proposition 63, which was signed into law as the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA). The MHSA applied…
To Ignore or Not to Ignore Non-Response Bias
From Davern (2013): …the three surveys studied showed that for the same total survey budget approximately twice the effective sample size (e.g., from 10,000 to 20,000 effective sample size completed responses) could be obtained if a less aggressive protocol were followed and the research team were willing to accept an approximately 40 percent lower response…
Physician Visits in Germany
Will the Affordable Care Act’s reduced reimbursement rates for providers serving the publicly insured make the U.S. look like Germany? Maybe. Let me explain why. Background on health insurance in Germany A JHE study by Hendrik Schmitz provides some insight regarding the German health insurance system and a reform in 1997. German physicians are remunerated…