Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Consumer Reports writes that “66% of those polled by Consumer Reports said they found out the cost of a drug when they picked it up at the pharmacy counter, while just 4% said they had a conversation with their doctor about the cost of a drug.” Because doctors do not discuss cost with their patients, these…
How do you estimate the specific risk a smoking has on the probability of being hospitalized. If smokers on average have lower income and less educational achievement, is smoking truly causing the increase in hospitalization or could the covariates fully or partially explain the increased hospitalization rates? A paper by Kleinman and Norton suggests using…
Nevada is contemplating ‘slapping’ a $5 tax on sex acts in brothels.
An NBER working paper by Jonathan Guryan, Melissa Schettini Kearney (2009) gives strong evidence that gambling is addictive using a creative identification technique: “We use the sale of a winning ticket in the zip code, the location of which is random conditional on sales, as an instrument for present consumption and test for a causal…
Harvard Professor Robert Dardon has a fascinating piece on books, college libraries, copyrights, and what’s Google’s drive to digitize the world’s books means to society. Some excerpts from the original New York Review of Books article are below. One of my colleagues is a quiet, diminutive lady, who might call up the notion of Marion the Librarian.…
Businessweek reports that the members of the G20 “…will pledge funds ‘more than doubling’ the amount the IMF initially sought to $750 billion.” Bloomberg reports that “In the past six months, the fund has approved $16.4 billion for Ukraine, $15.7 billion for Hungary, $10.4 billion for Latvia, $2.5 billion for Belarus, $2.1 billion for Iceland,…
Rural children are more likely to be overweight than urban children, despite the fact that children living in urban areas engage in less physical activity.
In honor of the beginning of the baseball season, Health Accesss Weblog presents this week’s Health Wonk Review with a Yogi Berra theme.
Using real world data is fraught with complexity. Wouldn’t it be nice to randomly change government regulations and see how people react? A paper by Stephen Rassenti and Carl Johnston use a laboratory experiment to do just that. In the experiment, survey participants are in charge of running a firm. The firm must decide if it will provide…
How do hospitals estimate the cost of different inpatient stays? A paper by Clement et al. (2009) reviews 3 techniques: Microcosting. “With microcosting, a detailed list of each component of a patient’s care is created and costed separately for each facet of a patient’s hospitalization. Given the level of detail, microcosting is generally considered the…