Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. has become more and more partisan and the views of both Democrats and Republicans have become less moderate over time. Is that the case with respect to views on health policy? A paper in JAMA last week by Blendon et al. (2021) conducted probability-based national surveys on four topics…
Many people have heard of evidence-based medicine (EBM). A perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine by Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, however, tries to define what evidence-based health policy (EBHP) is. They list three key criteria: Policies need to be well-specified. For instance, “expand Medicaid coverage” is too general, whereas specifying that benefit package A…
Scientists often use randomized controlled trials (RCT) to examine whether certain treatments have a causal effect on patient outcomes. For social scientists, however, conducting an RCT is more difficult. Nevertheless, there have been a number of health policy trials. In a recent NEJM paper, Newhouse and Normand (2017) review some of these trials. A summary…