Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
When I pay for health insurance, is most of my monthly premium going for medical care? Or does most of the money go towards administrative expenses and insurance company profit? John Aloysius Cogan Jr. of the Regulating Health Insurance blog finds that most of the money spent on insurance premiums in fact goes towards providing…
The Anti-Halloween edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Insure Blog.
Can we estimate risk aversion and prudence using a survey question for the general public? This is what a paper by Eisenhauer and Ventura attempts to do. Methods In the 1995 Survey of Italian Households’ Income and Wealth, one question asked: You are offered the opportunity of acquiring a security permitting you, with the same…
Many people believe that better information technology (IT) can help improve the quality of medical care in the U.S. and around the world. For instance, if a doctor prescribes a drug which interacts harmfully with a drug the patient is already taking, a computer program could notify the doctor of this problem. If a patient…
According to the Telegraph (‘Record numbers go abroad for health‘), “More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year – a figure that is forecast to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade.” Many of these individuals are seeking treatment in countries such as India, Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia, Poland and…
Many studies have revealed patient non-compliance with medical prescriptions (e.g.: not taking prescribed drugs, not visiting the doctor) at around 50%. Most medical researchers believe that non-adherence is either due to 1) irrationality or 2) misinformation. Yet a Health Economics article by Lamiraud and Geoffard (2007) tests the hypothesis of whether or not this behavior…
Here’s an entertaining comic from PhD Comics.
This is how a very interesting article (“P4P is changing me“) in Medical Economics begins. The essay won an award in the 2006 Doctors’ Writing Contest. The author of the story is a physician who has been under much financial pressure of late; a divorce, med school loans, a mortgage, alimony and child support were…
On the news yesterday that Microsoft purchased a 1.5% stake in Facebook for $240 million, social networking appears to highly valued commodity. “…[T]he strength of social networks among Mexican-Americans is positively related to access to care.” Is this true? That is hypothesis that a recent NBER working paper by Roan Gresenz, Escarce and Rogowski attempt…
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk has been posted at Hill’s Personal Finance blog.