Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
If you get sick and have a non-group health insurance plan, your premiums will increase. When you think about it, this really doesn’t make much sense. The concept of ‘health insurance’ is that it is supposed to protect your assets in the case where your health deteriorates. John Cochrane proposes one solution: the creation of…
Last month, I blogged about allowing a government-sponsored health plan to compete with private insurers. Joe Paduda gives one argument in favor of a public health insurer that any economist would love: increased competition. “The reality today is that almost every market is already dominated by a very few health plans, so much so that…
As an economist, I conduct most of my analysis based on the quantitative data. However, qualitative data should not be overlooked. A paper by Tucker et al. (2008) looks at how the front-line hospital staff evaluates quality issues. Some examples of their findings are: The largest number of operational failures occurred in the equipment/supply category.…
The N.Y. Times has an interesting profile of Freeman Dyson, a man who claims that global warning may not pose a grave risk to civilization. Dyson agrees with the scientific consensus that: Rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere are caused by human activity, The world is getting warmer, also due to human activity Using…