Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
NPR’s Fresh Air has an interesting interview with bioethicist Arthur Caplan, a professor from my alma matter the University of Pennsylvania. One key point was that Dr. Caplan said, to paraphrase, that if we can all agree that health care is a right than it will be easier to move forward with health care reform.…
NPR’s All Things Considered has an interesting report on health care in Russia. A few items that caught my eye ear: Russia offers birth bonuses of $9,500. In Russia each year, there are more abortions than live births. The wait for an MRI in Russia can be over 2 months. Doctors are often-well trained, but…
PPO? COBRA? HEDIS? SCHIP? ESRD? Are these monsters from a foreign land? No, there are just one of the many acronyms you’ll find in the healthcare industry. Wikipeida has a nice listing of some of the most frequently used healthcare acronyms that readers may find a useful reference.
Accidental injuries kill more than 2,000 children per day worldwide. The December 22, 2008 edition of Time lists the leading causes of accident-related childhood deaths worldwide: Other unintentional: 31.1% Road-traffic injuries: 22.3% Drowning: 16.8% Fire-related injuries: 9.1% Homicide: 5.8% Self-inflicted injuries: 4.4% Falls: 4.2% Poisoning: 3.9% War: 2.3%
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Insurance Copywriter.
At the turn of the century, the football (soccer) club Real Madrid began collecting some of the most famous players in the world. Termed los Galácticos by the media, the team included a stockpile all-world players such as Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo, Beckham, Michael Owen, Roberto Carlos, and Raúl. It seems Presdient-Elect Obama is trying to form…
A paper by Buchmueller, LoSasso and Wong (2008) recounts that “6 million children who are eligible for public insurance remain uninsured.” One question that remains to be answered is whether or not the 6 million children eligible for SCHIP who did not take it up were disproportionately from immigrant groups. If this was true, public…
Many health plans have used patient health ratings as important metrics for quality improvement. The simplest way to evaluated the quality of a health plan is to ask all members to rate the plan from 1-10 and take the average score. However, this simple averaging gives health plans an incentive to improve quality for low…
The Washington Post reports that the number of children who have been vaccinated in developing countries has been greatly exaggerated. Political pressure to increase vaccination rates as well as financial incentives from NGOs rewarded increased vaccinations has driven these reporting errors. Hat Tip: Marginal Revolution.
Does better screening lead to improvements in health outcomes? Conventional wisdom holds that this is always true. For instance, catching breast cancer at an early stage greatly improves survival probabilities. However, early screening can lead to a statistical anomaly where better screening appears to improve mortality rates even when treatments are entirely ineffective. Here is…