You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
Source: Binder and Rudolph (HSR 2009)
Tags: Overuse, Unnecessary Care
Last week a consortium of health insurers, health providers, hospitals and pharmaceutical manufacturers claimed that they could save the country $2 trillion in health care costs. I was skeptical of this claim.
It turns out now that the American Hospital Association (AHA)–one of the signees of the letter–is also skeptical. Fierce Healthcare reports that AHA president Richard Umbdenstock says “we did not say that we would save this country $2 trillion on our own.” Looks like the letter to Obama is no more than empty promises.
Tags: $2 Trillion, Letter to Obama
The state of California is in serious fiscal trouble. Those troubles extend the state’s flagship university system.
“The scenario that assumes failure of the May 19 state ballot propositions would leave the UC system with a net budget reduction of $322 million, or 10 percent, in the 2009-10 year. Taken together with the state’s underfunding of student enrollments and inflationary cost increases, the scenario would leave the university with a total budget gap of $531 million in 2009-10. The university’s current state-funded budget is $3.2 billion.”
Econ Journal Watch has a swath of quotations concerning intellectual pursuits.
“[The economist’s] response [to his impotence to influence opinion] may be to retire from that field of intellectual activity in which he could be of direct service to the community and… concentrate on the development of an intricate technique of analysis. he may then find himself the possessor of a logical system applicable to conditions which might conceivably exist, but a system which no legislator or administrator could be expected to understand, let alone find of service in the case of any concrete problem.“
“But now the whole scientific fraternity is out to understand the canvas and the colors—not the picture. in fact, one can say that only he who has a clear view of the overall picture of life and existence can avail himself of the individual sciences without harm to himself, for without such a normative overall picture the sciences are threads which nowhere lead to a goal and make our life’s course all the more confused and labyrinthine.”
“[t]he economist appears to be hopelessly out of tune with his time, giving unpractical advice to which the public is not disposed to listen and having no influence upon contemporary events.”
“…Consider trying to convince the typical noneconomist faculty member that the Minimum Wage act is not terribly helpful for poor laborers… Suppose an economist, in an applied effort to help a very poor country, recommends to its government a program for attracting foreign capital. The suggestion is that bringing in plants to use semiskilled labor to produce low-quality textiles is possible, if you are willing to pay their workers a dollar a day, which is twice what they are now making on the farm. The economist feels that getting them off the farm and into industry is the only real way of raising living standards in the country. The suggested wage is so low that the average member of the faculty at the university where the economist works would regard it as inhumane exploitation… Clearly, life in the university would be much less pleasant than if the economist had concentrated on Ramsey pricing. ”
The Workers Comp Insider hosts this week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review. My favorite posts include:
Tags: HWR
Let us assume that our null hypothesis is that when someone is sick, it is not swine flu. A type I error is a false positive. That is, we claim that the person has the swine flu, when actually then do not. A type II error is a false negative. This means that the person has swine flu, but we erroneously conclude that they do not.
What is the probability that someone who has flu-like symptoms actually has swine flu? We can calculate this using Bayes Rule:
Let us assume that all individuals with swine flu have symptoms so that P(Symptoms|H1N1)=1. Let us assume 2% of the population gets any type of flu each year and displays symptoms. Let us assume only .02% of the population gets H1N1. So, P(symptoms)=0.02 and P(H1N1)=.0002. Thus we have:
This means that if we see a random person with the flu like symptoms, there is only a 1% chance that they actually have the swine flu.
This may explain why the CDC and WHO ignored early warnings from a Washington-based biosurveillance company concerning a possible flu outbreak. Although there was an increase in the number of cases of influenza, the probability that it was an outbreak of H1N1 (or any type of outbreak) was low. Although probability of a false positive was high, the cost of a false negative is also large. Ex-post, it is obvious that the CDC and WHO should have acted quicker to fight the spread H1N1. Ex-ante, these organizations likely receive numerous reports of potential outbreaks and acting on every single one–most of which turn out to be false–would be very costly. Identifying the optimal time to initial school closings and public health warnings is very difficult and must take into account both the probabilities and the costs of type I and type II errors.
Tags: Statistics, Swine Flu
Google now has a website in Beta called Knol. Knol basically has a bunch of user responses to ‘how-to’ questions. The winner of a Google contest for the best knol was how to “Talk to Your Doctor” by Dr. Jennifer Frank. The article gives a list of things to bring to a doctor’s visit, such as:
Dr. Frank offers other helpful advise as well.
Tags: Consumers
Google has created easy to use charts on U.S. population and employment from public-use data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Instructions of how to use this data can be found here (video). Here are some examples I created:
Tags: BLS, Census, Data, Population, Unemployment
A recent study found that “Acupuncture is an effective treatment for chronic back pain. People receiving acupuncture are more likely to get better.”
How does it work? The treatment’s placebo effect explains the study’s findings. Researchers found that acupuncture was effective whether or not the skin was punctured.
Tags: Acupuncture
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