Cavalcade of Risk #26 is up
This week’s edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Colorado Health Insurance Insider.
Month: May 2007
Laurence Baker
Laurence Baker is a health economist at Stanford’s Center for Health Policy. Much of Mr. Baker’s work has dealt with how HMOs have affected care levels. Today I will briefly review three of Baker’s articles: HMO Penetration and the Cost of Health Care (AER 1996) In this paper, Baker and Corts look how HMO market…
Will Medical IT increase cost? Is slow adoption better?
Why is it taking so long for the medical industry to adopt information and communication technology? Is it a good thing that it is taking so long? This is the question addressed by an interesting and non-technical NBER working paper by Michael Christensen and Dahlia Remler (“ICT in Chronic Disease Care“) What is Information and…
Generic Medical Devices
Generic drugs dramatically reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals to patients. Can generic medical devices reduce the cost for hospital administrators? Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog interviews Richard Kuntz, CEO of Generic Medical Devices. Mr. Kuntz wants to reduce the cost of the implants, surgical implementation, and supplies used in medical care. The company…
Schwarzenegger’s Health Reform Proposal
What exactly is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposing in his health care initiative unveiled early this year? Below I briefly summarize his press release, as to what the reforms will entail and then follow with some of my comments. Individual Mandate All individuals must have a minimum level of insurance. Children Children of families whose income…
VA Played Fast and Loose With the Facts
The VA has often been held up as an example as to why a centralized health care system works well. An interesting post from The Sentinel Effect looks at a North Carolina’s The News & Observer column (“VA Overselling its medical care“) stating that the VA system results are not as good as they claim.
Cal Health Reform
Do you live in California? Are you interested in health care issues? Then you may be interested in the Cal Health Reform website. The website has links to various health reform proposals including a summary of Governor Schwarzenegger’s health reform initiative. There is also a brief powerpoint presentation from health economist Jon Gruber of M.I.T.…
Nursing Home Residents, Hospice Care and Hospitalizations
A recent paper in the Health Services Research journal (“Hospice…“) looks at whether hospice care reduces hospitalizations for elderly terminally ill patients in nursing homes. In the introduction, authors Pedro Gozalo and Susan Miller state that there are two main implications which result from end-of-life hospitalizations: “At the patient level, hospitalizations of frail NH [nursing…
Health Insurance and Medical Care Utilization
Does health insurance increase utilization of medical services? Economic theory generally predicts that it will. Health insurance decreases the price individuals pay for medical care and thus the equilibrium quantity of medical care used will increase. A paper by Buchmueller, Grumbach, Kronick and Kahn (âEffect of Health Insurance on Medical Care Utilization…â?) examines this phenomenon…
RAND HIE…The Sequel
Robin Hanson has spent the last week blogging on his Overcoming Bias website asking individuals to sign a petitions to redo the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE). For those who do not know what the RAND HIE, Mr. Hanson has two posts (#1 and #2) describing the experiment. I agree with Mr. Hanson when he…