Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
As a resident of Southern California for the last 3 years, I have gained intimate knowledge of the price of perfect weather: traffic. How do you fix traffic in a “a sprawling mid-density city” such as Los Angeles or San Diego? This Sunday’s L.A. Times (“How to fix traffic”) gives some suggestions that most economists…
Anna Gorman was faced with a terrible decision: remove her ovaries and be faced without a life with the children she desired, or keep the ovaries and face a 54% higher chance of ovarian cancer and 81% chance of breast cancer. Mrs. Gorman has the BRCA1 genetic mutation which puts her at great risk for…
A frequent topic of investigation in health economics is to estimate the elasticity of the demand for medical procedures with respect to wait times. A paper by Martin, Rice, Jacobs and Smith in the Journal of Health Economics uses quarterly data from 200 English hospitals between 1995-2002 in order to separately estimate the supply and…
For those who were interested in my post earlier today on water quality in developing nations, NPR’s Marketplace has an interesting story on the high level of pollution in China’s lakes and rivers.
One of the UN Millennium Goals is to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. We know that large-scale investments in piped water have dramatic impacts on reducing childhood mortality. Piped water, however, may be prohibitively expensive for the nations to provide to rural residents…
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Inurance Help Hub.
Does waiting longer for a medical appointment increase mortality? According to Julia Prentice and Steven Piezer’s 2007 article it does. The authors have data regarding individual wait times for Veterans Affairs (VA) geriatric visits as well as subsequent mortality data on each individual. There are two major problems when trying to link increased wait times…
In a recent NBER working paper (“Tradeoffs“), authors Christopher Afendulis and Daniel Kessler, pose an interesting question: should the physician who is diagnosing you also be the one who provides treatment? On the one hand, a physician who both diagnoses and provides treatment has a financial incentive to recommend to the patient that they should…
Since Easter just passed yesterady and we are still in the midst of the Passover holiday, today I decided to blog on the economics of religion. No, this title is not an oxymoron. A Businessweek article from 2004 (“Economists are getting religion“) cites the Economics of Religion as an emerging field. One of the leading…
I have recently finished the latest draft of a working paper titled “Operating on commission: Analyzing how physician financial incentives affect surgery rates using nationally representative household data.” It should be interesting to readers who wonder how financial incentives affect specialist care provision. Below is the paper’s abstract. Any comments regarding the paper’s contents would…