Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Introduction Much of health care today is paid for by managed care plans. If the managed care plans are profit maximizers–which I assume them to be–then they face a tradeoff. By offering a lower quality of care, they will make more money; but lowering the quality of care reduces the demand for their insurance product. …
Some interesting bits I found on the Health Wonk blog-o-sphere: Joe Paduda looks at why Kaiser Permanente is starting to offer PPOs and high deductible plans. Fard Johnmar at Envisioning 2.0 discusses Walmart’s plan to offer generic drugs for as low as $4. A Wall Street Journal/Harris poll shows that the vast majority of healthcare…
Josesph Stiglitz’s recent article (“Give prizes not patents“) in the New Scientist voices a valid concern that patents may be stifling–not enhancing–innovation. He worries that IP (Intellectual Property) attorneys are involved in an “enclosure movement” by which a firm tries to patent a new idea as well as many complimentary or peripheral ideas which surround the…
What is economic growth? How can it be understood? One concise explanatino is given by Brad DeLong in an article for Wired (“The Real Shopping Cart Revolution“). In the article, DeLong compares the relative price of flour now to the relative price in the fifteenth to seventeenth and concludes that modern man is 430 times richer…
The 2006-2007 Global Competitiveness Report has been released by World Economic Forum. The rankings can be found at the World Economic Forum website (PDF). “The rankings are drawn from a combination of publicly available hard data and the results of the Executive Opinion Survey, a comprehensive annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, together…
Medicaid currently accounts for roughly 50% of all nursing home expenditures and 70% of all bed days. The government mandates that nursing homes provide a uniform level of quality to all residents, regardless of the payer type. Yet one may ask: does this mandate hold in reality? Nursing homes may have an incentive to segregate private insurance…
A common assumption is that longer life expectancy leads to economic growth. If longevity is a proxy for health and we expect healthier workers to be more productive, longevity should lead to more economic productivity. Further, if individuals live longer, they will have a longer payback period for their investments in human capital (i.e.: education).…
Generalists can give holistic, cost-effective care to patients, but may be limited in their ability to treat complex diseases. Specialist may offer a superior quality of medical services and advance knowledge in their field, but this premium medicine comes at a high cost. Generalist or specialist…Specialist or generalist…which to chose? A 1996 New England Journal of…
There is a dynamic relationship between generalists and specialists. Currently, 4.5% of visits to PCPs result in a referral. A RAND study and my own investigation of the 1998-1999 Community Tracking Survey show that about 10% of individuals are hospitalized at least once each year. How should we model the decision patients face between generalist and specialist care.…
The so-called genius awards (actually called the MacArthur Foundation fellows) are given to 25 individuals based on “their creativity, originality, and potential to be significant contributors in their fields.” Recipients receive $500,000 over five years with no strings attached. One of the recipients which interests this blog is Victoria Hale (bio). She is a pharmaceutical…