Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
It makes sense that more educated individuals have lower mortality rates. Better education may improve health literacy. More education can lead to higher income and and more employee health benefits (with better insurance coverage). However, does living in communities with more educated individuals impact mortality separately from whether an individual’s family is highly educated? According…
That is the finding from a CDC report released this month. Mortality rates fell by 24% between 2001 and 2021. Specifically, the cancer death rate for youth ages 0–19 years was 2.75 per 100,000 in 2001, but decrease to 2.10 per 100,000 in 2021. The analysis uses data including (i) cause of death data from…
A paper by Brady et al. (2023) aims to measure this relationship in the US. They use data from the 1997-2019 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data merged with the Cross-National Equivalent File. The data were validated with information from the National Death Index. The authors adjust for self-reported health, demographics, comorbidities and a…
Clayton 2019 is an interesting study on the impact of drug spending on Medicaid beneficiary mortality levels. The author uses variation in the roll out of Medicaid drug coverage by state across different Medicaid eligible groups in order to isolate plausibly exogenous variation in drug expenditures. Using this approach, Clayton finds that: …a $1 increase…
Siegel et al. (2019) present a review of cancer incidence and mortality statistics in American over recent decades. Their key findings were: Over the past decade of data, the cancer incidence rate (2006‐2015) was stable in women and declined by approximately 2% per year in men, whereas the cancer death rate (2007‐2016) declined annually by…
There have been numerous articles (e.g., Krugman in the NY Times) stating that disparities in life expectancy is growing. It is known that income inequality has grown in recent decades but some claim that health inequality is also growing. Janet Currie argues that the truth is not as bad as you think in a forthcoming article…
Huh and Reif (2017) have an interesting study of the effect of Medicare Part D on mortality. The abstract is below. We investigate the implementation of Medicare Part D and estimate that this prescription drug benefit program reduced elderly mortality by 2.2% annually. This was driven primarily by a reduction in cardiovascular mortality, the leading cause of…
A JAMA Oncology paper estimating the global burden of cancer is getting a lot of attention in the press. The study’s key findings are: In 2015, there were 17.5 million cancer cases worldwide and 8.7 million deaths. Between 2005 and 2015, cancer cases increased by 33% A 33% increase in cancer cases!!! There must be an…
According to a paper by Jena et al. (2014), the answer is no. The paper examines 30-day mortality rates for Medicare patients admitted to the hospital with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) or heart failure and compares “…mortality and treatment differences…during dates of national cardiology meetings compared with nonmeeting dates.mortality rates “during dates of national cardiology…
How do you measure the value of reduced mortality from a specific disease? Just because you are less likely to die from AIDS in a given year does not mean that your likelihood of dying from cancer will decrease. Thus, how does one model the monetary value of a decrease in disease-specific mortality within a…