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The World Cup tournament began today with a 1-1 tie between Mexico and the host South Africa. The USA’s first game is against England on Saturday. Who will win the World Cup? Using ESPN’s Soccer Power Index (SPI), FiveThirtyEight.com predicts the following tournament favorites:
According to this method, the USA only has a 1.1% chance of winning, but the odds it will make it out of the group stage are 56.9%.
Tags: World Cup
If California were to enact a mandate for insurance companies to cover certain services, how much would this cost? How would it affect public health? Would utilization change?
To answer these questions, the California legislature charged the California Health Benefits Review Program (CHBRP) to estimate the medical effectiveness, public health and cost implications of proposed health benefit mandates. A paper in Health Services Research discusses the methods used to evaluate these potential mandates. In particular, legislators want the following two questions answered:
The data sources used to answer these questions include:
These reviews estimate not only the short term impact of a mandate, but also the long term impact. For instance, if a certain mandate increased utilization in the short run, costs likely will rise. If the increased utilization improves patient health in the long run, however, costs may decrease over a longer time horizon due to decreased hospitalization rates.
A “killer” edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Boston Health News.
Tags: HWR
In spring of 2009, the federal government passed the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act or CHIPRA. The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), formerly known as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) provides health insurance to low income children. Like Medicaid, it is federally mandated, but state run. Some states provide health insurance for kids through existing Medicaid programs while others have created a separate insurance scheme. The eligibility of kids for CHIP is more generous (as judged by FPL) than Medicaid.
Two sources have good reviews of the new provisions that were added to CHIP in the Reauthorization Act of 2009. I have also made this table which summarizes these new CHIP provisions in the bill.
The Stimulus Package, also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), key goal was to boost a flagging economy. A number of the provisions in the $787 billion package went towards health care provisions. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that “the Act includes $149 billion in health spending of which $87 billion is for a temporary increase in the federal share of Medicaid costs, $25 billion for temporary COBRA subsidies, and other spending for health information technology (HIT), the National Institutes of Health and for Community Health Centers.”
To summarize the impact of ARRA on Medicaid funding, I have made the following table.
Tags: ARRA, Fiscal Stimulus, Medicaid, Stimulus Package
Health Reform, also known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), drastically altered the health care landscape. Congress included health exchanges, and individual mandate, and a number of other reforms into the bill. Today, I focus on how Health Reform will affect existing programs which care for the nations poor. In particular, CHIP funds medical care for many of the nation’s youth and Medicaid provides health insurance coverage to low-income Americans. Both programs operate under a federal mandate, but are run at the state level. The Kaiser Family Foundation outlines the Health Reform provisions that will alter both the Medicaid and CHIP programs.
To summarize these findings, I have created the following table.
Tags: CHIP, Health Reform, Medicaid, PPACA
Tags: Links
One measure of longevity that may better reflect the quality of a medical care in a country is life expectancy at age 50. According to a recent article in the Penn SAS Magazine (p. 16-p.17) life expectancy in the U.S. for non-smokers is 84.9 for females and 81.2 for males. These figures rank 7th and 9th among all developed nations.
Longevity for smokers is significantly shorter. In the U.S., the longevity is 82.3 for females and 78.5 for men. These figures rank 17th and 14th among developed nations.
The observation that the life expectancy for smokers is shorter is not surprising. However, why does the U.S. rank so much worse for life expectancy for smokers than non-smokers? Is the U.S. medical treatment for smokers so much worse than that of other developed countries? I would guess not.
The likely cause of the ranking change is due to the selection of people into the smoking group. It many be the case that smokers in the U.S., are poorer, less educated and more likely to be obese than non-smokers. Thus, because the group of smokers is at a socioeconomic disadvantage, this can explain why the U.S. longevity ranking is lower for smokers than non-smokers.
Many people stereotype that in France, smoking may be more respectable in high class society and smoking may not be as concentrated in poorer individuals. In fact, we observe that France ranks 4th in female life expectancy for non-smokers but 3rd in female life expectancy for smokers. A similar phenomenon may exist in Spain; the life expectancy for non-smoking females ranks 11th, but the life expectancy for smokers is 5th in the world. However, these trends are not as strong for differences in male life expectancy between smokers and non-smokers.
Tags: Selection Bias, Smoking
Julie Ferguson of Workers’ Comp Insider takes the helm of the 4th Anniversary edition of the Cavalcade of Risk.
Tags: CoR
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