Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
If a child dies during childbirth, should the impact of the child’s death on parental quality of life be considered? What about interventions that prevent miscarriages; should the health of the fetus be considered or only that of the mother? A paper by Lamsal et al. (2024) conducts a systematic review to examine which individual’s…
An NBER paper by Dettling and Kearney (2023) finds that unemployment rate impacts both fertility rates and birth outcomes. Using data on birth outcomes from National Center for Health Statistics, data on local unemployment from BLS’s Local Area Unemployment Statistics, data on the share of families who are liquidity-constrained from the Survey of Consumer Finances.…
An interesting study from Masters et al. (2023): Induction of labor (IOL) rates in the United States have nearly tripled since 1990. We examine official U.S. birth records to document increases in states’ IOL rates among pregnancies to Black, Latina, and White women. We test if the increases are associated with changes in demographic characteristics…
AJMC reports that Humana has designed a new bundled payment model for maternity care. Initially, 5 practices will participate in a pilot study. While some claimed that bundled payment will improve quality and reduce cost (see “Bundle of Joy“), do we expect this to happen in practice? The key question is, what one means in…
What do women care about when giving birth? A study Maurer et al. (2016) conducted a focus group study of 41 pregnant women in North Carolina. They found that women valued the following aspects of quality. Providing individualized care that focuses on, and has respect for, each woman’ s health, needs, and personal preferences for labor,…
The popularity of home births has been rising in recent years. One question is whether they are as safe as in-hospital births. A new study in NEJM found that most home births are safe, but hospital births are safer. As the N.Y. Times reports: The study analyzed nearly 80,000 pregnancies in Oregon, and found that…
This is according to the CIA World Factbook. Why does the U.S. rank so high? Is it due to the health of the mothers? More premature babies being born (thus meaning that the average birth in the U.S. is more complex)? Or is it the standard of medical care? A website on evidenced based maternity…
Why aren’t physicians more supportive of home births and midwifery? The answer is that it eats into their market share and reduces their income. “[In the 1970s] feminists argued that medical care needed to be demystified and women’s lives demedicalized. They maintained that childbirth was not a disease and normal deliveries did not require hospitalization…
From the N.Y. Times: The national Caesarean rate, 31.8 percent, has been rising steadily for the last 11 years and is fed by repeat patients. Critics say that doctors are performing too many Caesareans, needlessly exposing women and infants to surgical risks and running up several billion dollars a year in excess bills, precisely the…
Does taking time off of work help to improve maternal health after pregnancy? A recent NBER working paper by Pinka Chatterji and Sara Markowitz attempts to answer this question. The abstract of the paper is below: In the United States, almost a third of new mothers who worked during pregnancy return to work within three…