Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a Journal of Economic Perspectives article by Martin Gaynor and Amanda Starc (2026). The article provides an overview of the current levels of competition in US health insurance markets, considers theoretic issues in what levels of competition are optimal, what empirical studies have found of the impact of competition and…
When health economics emerged as a distinct discipline in the late 1960s, mainstream academic and policy paradigms widely presumed that competitive market mechanisms were structurally incompatible with medical delivery. Influenced by foundational ideas like Kenneth Arrow’s 1963 landmark paper emphasizing the pervasive friction of clinical uncertainty, early experts argued that society had to look almost…
One of the reasons is that health-related academic research is often wrong. Biostatisticians have studied the question of just how frequently published studies come up with wrong answers. A highly regarded researcher in this subfield of medical wrongness is John Ioannidis, who heads the Stanford Prevention Research Center, among other appointments. Using several different…
Access to care for rural Americans can be difficult, even for individuals covered by Medicaid. The New York Times examines whether Iran can serve as a model to serve rural Americans, such as those located in the Mississippi delta. The Iranians built “health houses” to minister to 1,500 people who lived within at most an…
Health Affairs’ July/August 2008 edition discusses the health care system of 2 emerging powers: China and India. Today, I will analyze the two countries health care systems over time and what they they can expect in the future. Like most developed countries, healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP has risen over time for these…