Wednesday Links

Marijuana use: causes or only correlated with dropping out of school. Elasticity of health spending in India on mortality: 0.2. Reference Pricing in Medicare? Crowdsourcing your medical problems. The impact of medical insurance for the poor in Georgia (the country). Resolving scientific disputes with “fisticuffs.” Licensing pharmacies in Greece.

Vaccines=Big Business?

In 2005, the market for pediatric vaccines was about $5 billion and the market for adult vaccines was about $4 billion.  Yet these figures could be small potatoes.  The Economist predicts that pediatric vaccine market will reach $20 billion by 2014; the adult vaccine market won’t be far behind. What innovations may be on the…

Why providers love ACOs

“The good thing about the systems not being highly integrated and coordinated is that premiums are lower. Why are those hospitals and physicians [integrating]?  It wasn’t for increased coordination of care, disease management, blah, blah, blah—that was not the primary reason. They wanted more money and market share.” A Fresno, California medical group physician Using…

Finite Population Correction

Asymptotic theory has played a large role in the development of many recent econometric methods. For instance, the central limit theorem states that distribution of the mean drawn from any large samples is approximately normally distributed. Asymptotic theory, however, generally assumes that sampling occurs infinitely and with replacement. In the real world, populations are not…

The Nobel Prize in Economics goes to…

Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen, and Christopher A. Pissarides. From the Nobel press release: On many markets, buyers and sellers do not always make contact with one another immediately. This concerns, for example, employers who are looking for employees and workers who are trying to find jobs. Since the search process requires time and…