Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
These trends are summarized on their webpage and in a larger report. Here they are with some key excerpts from their report: Real world Evidence. “As RWE continues to gain significant traction in healthcare, agencies including the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the European Medicines Agency (EMA), The National Institute for Health and…
How does quarantining impact COVID-19 deaths? Just comparing individuals who did compared to did not quarantine is problematic since this will be a non-randomized sample. Individuals who adhere to quarantine recommendations may be more careful overall (e.g., better mask adherence, less likely to be smokers, conduct more preventive care) and thus the benefits of quarantining…
Tyler Cowen has an interesting interview with Harvard health economist David Cutler speaking about (what else?) health economics. Below is an excerpt: CUTLER: Everything that we know in healthcare is that people have difficulty choosing on the basis of price and quality. It goes back a little bit to some of the behavioral issues that…
Economist and N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman provided a tribute to the late Uwe Reinhardt. Although I won’t get into any of Krugman’s comments of Reinhardt as a person, I did find Krugman’s comments about his perception of the field of health economics interesting. For instance: In case you don’t know this, health economics is…
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has a long but very interesting interview with Amy Finkelstein, one of the preeminent health economist of our time. The interview covers a number of topics including the correlation between adverse selection and risk aversion, annuity markets, geographic variation in health care spending, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, and…
Who are the leaders in the field of health economics? Below I list the top 10 health economics scholars, institutions and journals as ranked by a recent JHE article by Adam Wagstaff and Anthony J. Culyer. A more complete list is also available here. Top Health Economists David M. Cutler Jonathan Gruber Frank A. Sloan…
Do MRIs increase the liklihood a patient receives back surgery? “Orthopedists and primary care physicians who begin billing for the performance of MRI procedures, rather than referring patients outside of their practice for MRI, appear to change their practice patterns such that they use more MRI for their patients with low back pain. These increases…
My paper on how physician compensation affects surgery rates is being published in the May 2010 edition of Health Economics. The abstract from the article is below: “This paper employs a nationally representative, household-based dataset in order to test how the compensation method of both the specialists and the primary care providers affects surgery rates.…