Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Are people irrational? Many economic experiments have shown that people often make seemingly irrational or paradoxical choices. An article by Ryan, Watson, and Entwistle (Health Econ 2009) probes whether or not people really are irrational using discrete choice experiments (i.e., pick option A or option B). What they found is that some of the “irrational” behavior is often…
This week my paper on Pharmacists as vaccinators was accepted for publication by the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Benefits. Co-authored with John Fontanesi, Jan Hirsch, Sarah Lorentz, and Debra Bowers, “Comparison of Pharmacists and Primary Care Providers as Immunizers” examines whether pharmacists are productive and efficient vaccinators. The abstract of the paper is below. The…
In the run-up of real estate and stock market prices, demand for labor in the construction, real estate, finance industry was high. With the drastic drop in real estate and stock market prices, the demand for loan officers, construction workers and investment bankers has dropped. Individuals who have been laid must find a new job.…
Cuba is well known for its high quality cigars and sugar production, but is less well-known for its production of high quality pharmaceuticals. According to MSNBC, “With more than 7,000 scientists dedicated to researching new drugs, Cuba has one of the most sophisticated biotech industries in the developing world. Last year the country earned $350…
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Wisdom from Wenchpoo’s Mental Wastebasket.
Foreign born recipients of U.S. based doctoral degrees: Science and Engineering: 51% in 2003, 27% in 1973. Physical sciences: 50% in 2003 Engineering: 67% in 2003 Economics: 68% in 2003 Citation: John Bound, Sarah Turner, Patrick Walsh (2009) “Internationalization of U.S. Doctorate Education,” NBER Working Paper No. 14792.
A recent report from Cover the Insured.org reviews the how health insurance trends have evolved over the last ten to fifteen years. The percent of uninsured individuals has increased from 16.0% of the population in 1995 to 17.5% of the population in 2006. The increase is entirely due to the increase in uninsurance among working…
More evidence that although preventive may improve patient health, it may also increase costs. (See also my post from 12 Feb 2008). Afschin Gandjour (2009) “Aging diseases – do they prevent preventive health care from saving costs?” Health Economics, v18(3): 355-362.
Let us say you have 10 observations of 2 different variables. How do you determine which of the observations to use? Should you throw out the outliers? Should you only include the most similar values? Does more observations increase or decrease the amount of measurement error? These problems can be answered by the discipline of Statistics.…
“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.” — E.B. White