Health Benefits of a Vacation

The Healthcare Economist will be off through Labor Day, taking a vacation to San Diego.  Inspired by this trip, below is a study that finds that people who take vacations are healthier.  Although not a randomized trial, this evidence is suggestive.  The Huffington Post paraphrases:   In a study of 13,000 middle-aged men at risk for heart disease, those who…

Why don’t payers adopt my technology?

Why don’t payers adopt innovative approaches to treat mental illness? For instance, crisis intervention programs, recovery-focused consumer education programs, telehealth programs, and on-line treatment programs have sometimes have had problems receiving reimbursement from payers. Monica Oss of OpenMinds takes the payers’ perspective: Often, the organization proposing the new program comes to the table with an…

Medicare Advantage Plans: Thumbs Up or Down?

Austin Frakt says although Medicare Advantage plans used to be considered high cost, low-quality options, in recent years, these Medicare Advantage plans have vastly increased quality of care and have become less focused on cream-skimming healthier patients.   Medicare Advantage plans — private plans that serve as alternatives to the traditional, public program for those…

Does poor mental health decrease your job prospects?

Conventional wisdom holds that individuals with serious mental illenesses will have more difficulty acquiring and retaining a job.  Measuring the magnitude of the effect of any mental illness on employment empirically is difficult because of a dual-causality problem.  People with mental illnesses may have difficulty gaining employment, but losing employment also has an adverse effect on…