Cavalcade of Risk

Recent Articles

• Does spending improve outcomes?

  March 12, 2010 in P4P, Public Policy, Quality

  From a paper by Weinstein and Skinner (NEJM 2010): “Moreover, there is considerable variation in health care expenditures and a weak or even negative association between spending and outcomes, such as mortality at the regional …

• Comparative Effectiveness vs. Cost Effectiveness Research

  March 11, 2010 in Public Policy, Quality

  Comparative Effectiveness has been a hot topic in health services research. According to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, “the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 authorizes the expenditure …

• 100th Edition of the CoR plus other links

  March 10, 2010 in Carnivals, Current Events

  Russell Hutchinson presents the 100th edition of the Cavalcade of Risk. Here are some other links of interest German Ministry of Health considers a 20-30% cut in hospital beds….

• “The country’s dismal rates of vaginal birth after Caesarean”

  March 9, 2010 in Nonphysician Clinicians, Physician Compensation

  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 …

• The Value of End-of-Life Medical Care

  March 8, 2010 in Economics - General

  Some estimates claim that one-quarter of life-time spending on medical care occurs in the last year of an individual’s life.  Conventional wisdom says this is inefficient, but a paper by Philipson, Becker, Goldman and …