Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Moral hazard and adverse selection are ever-present problems in the health insurance market. Identifying their existence and their magnitudes is difficult. Most of the papers presented in this blog have used a reduced form approach [see Finkelstein, McGarry (2003) and Bhattacharya, Vogt (2006)]. Today we will look at a paper by Bajari, Hong and Khwaja where the…
Seven hundred twenty million dollars. This would the the annual cost to immunize all girls against the human papilloma virus (HPV). According to the Detroit Free Press (“Law…“), the state of Michigan is considering requiring all girls entering the sixth grade to receive the HPV vaccine. Is this good policy? Cervical cancer affects 9,700 women…
In the early- and mid- 1990s, hospitals were under pressure. Managed care was taking off and forcing hospitals to reduce prices. These managed care plans had the upper hand because: Competition between hospitals was intense. Each hospital had to fight to secure contracts from managed plans in order to direct large chunks of patients to their…
The Poisson distribution is one that is often used in health economics. Wikipedia has a nice basic summary of the Poisson distribution; Wolfram MathWorld gives a more sophisticated analysis. The distribution is where ‘λ‘ is equal to the number of expected occurrences in a period. The distribution expresses the probability of a number of events…
In January of this year, I wrote (“Does drinking wine truly increase longevity“) that I was doubtful that wine has a large impact on longevity. As a dedicated social scientist, I have decided not to simply accept the findings of other experts, but instead to do some of my own empirical research. Monday and Tuesday…
Jason has insurance and his brother Nosaj does not. Jason utilizes more medical services than Nosaj. Is this situation occuring because Jason is truly sicker than Nosaj (adverse selection), or is this because since Jason has insurance, medical services are cheaper for him than Nosaj (moral hazard)? Disentangling the problems of moral hazard and adverse selection…
Health Wonk Review #15 is posted at Henry Stern’s InsureBlog. FYI: While Mr. Stern refers to me as Dr. Shafrin, I have not yet completed my PhD and thus a title of “Mister” is the only one I can currently claim.
The BBC reports that patients in the EU may soon have the right to go to any EU country for medical treatment. In a September 5th article (“EU chief…“), one can see a future of medical tourism in the EU. Many EU members have argued that medical services fall outside the scope of the single…
Daniel Polsky and Sean Nicholson have two papers which aim to look at employer health insurance offerings. The first [Polsky, Nicholson (2004)] tries to estimate the factors driving the cost differences between HMO plans and non-HMO (eg: PPO, indemnity) plans. The authors deconstruct the cost differences into three factors: Utilization Effect: this occurs if individuals…
How do you measure the level of corruption in a nation? Transparency International uses a Perceptions Index to rank the corruption of each nation. The problem with this index is that it does not give the true corruption of officials, but the resulting corruption from a mix of personal corruption and the effective enforcement of…