Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This Sunday’s New York Times’ Magazine has a bunch of interesting, non-technical articles about income inequality. Should we globalize labor too? “[Development Economist Lant Pritchett] likens the limits on labor mobility to ‘apartheid on a global scale.’” The Inequality Conundrum. Roger Lowestein discusses the age-old debate between equity and efficiency. Larry Summer’s Evolution. “The history…
Help a graduate student with their dissertation by completing the following survey: The News Media and Immigration Attitudes This survey is designed to help us understand what Americans like you think about immigration and the news media. We are very interested in your thoughts on this matter and greatly appreciate your participation. Click here…
How do medical expenditures affect mortality for end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients? Avi Dor, Mark Pauly, Margaret Eichleay and Philip Held try to answer this question with data from 12 developed countries (“ESRD and Economic Incentives“). The authors end up finding that increased expenditures on ESRD have no statistically significant affect on mortality. The correlation…
UCSD professor Gordon Hanson‘s recent work on immigration was recently cited in The Economist (“Guests v Gatecrashers“). The article states: Its laws of motion are set out in a recent paper [‘The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration‘] by Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego. He points out that unskilled labour is increasingly…
The First Anniversary Edition of the Cavalcade of Risk has been posted Hank Stern’s InsureBlog.
The Nursing Home Compare website provides consumers with quality ratings of thousands of nursing homes (NHs) around the country. Are these ratings accurate? Could they be improved? This is the question which researchers Arling, Lewis, Kane, Mueller and Flood analyze in their 2007 HSR paper. The authors find 2 major flaws with the rankings: 1)…
According to a 2005 Health Affairs article by Himmelstein et al. (“Illness And Injury As Contributors To Bankruptcy“), about half of all individuals filing for personal bankruptcy cite medical expenses as one of the major causes. A lapse in insurance coverage contributed to many of these high medical expenses which lead to the bankruptcy.
Most health care scholars–whether they are scientists, doctors or economists–believe that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the best means by which one can test whether or not a drug is efficacious. Despite its high cost, RCTs are able to abstract from confounding factors by randomly assigning similar patients to both a treatment and a placebo-controlled…
What issues are facing primary care physicians in the near future? A nice article by Eugene Rich and Anna Maio discusses just this topic in their paper “Late to the Feast: Primary Care and US Health Policy.” Some issues discussed are: How FFS payment systems compare to prepaid-group practice with regards to the type of…
The Times of London reports (“…no surgery until you quit“) that smokers who needed surgery “…would not be added to waiting lists until they had given up smoking.” While there is vast medical evidence that shows the hazards of smoking as well as the fact that smoking reduces recovery time from surgery, should we really…