Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Typically, people focus on how severe diseases affect their health. Clearly, however, poor health also can affect people’s income as well as some disease makes holding a job difficult or impossible. Even people in good health with serious diseases may lower income if they need to miss work frequently for frequent doctor’s appointments. In fact,…
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to increase health insurance coverage largely through two pathways: (i) raising the income limits for individuals to qualify for Medicaid, (ii) creating new health insurance exchanges and health insurance subsidies to encourage the purchase of private health insurance among individuals that were not eligible for Medicaid. Other provisions, such…
An article by Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb (“The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence“) provide an interesting perspective on how machine learning will affect employment with a nice example from the health care sector. All human activities can be described by five high-level components: data, prediction, judgment, action, and outcomes. For example, a visit to the…
Previous research has found that losing your job has an adverse effect on your physical and mental health. Because losing your job is endogenous, often studies of this sort look at plant closures as an individual’s job loss is largely uncorrelated with individual performance. An interesting paper by Schiele and Schmitz (2016) take this a step…
In a series of papers, Coile, Milligan and Wise look at Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. In the sixth installment of the series, the authors look specifically at disability programs. Although stereotypically one would believe that most people exit the workforce due to choice and rely on Social Security, job pensions, and…
Will the Affordable Care Act (aka ACA, aka Obamacare) cost American millions of jobs. A recent report by the CBO says yes. CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers…
More capable workers typically do have the best working conditions. The theory of compensating differentials, however, says that workers should be compensated in the form of higher wages for job amenities. So why is this the case empirically? Today, I review the Hanbook of Labor Economics chapter by Sherwin Rosen titled “The Theory of Equalizing…
Oportunidades (formlerly known as Progresa) is a well known initiative in Mexico that provides cash payments to families in exchange for regular school attendance, health clinic visits, and nutritional support. The program started in 1997 as a program known as Progresa; Oportunidades in its current form began in in 2002. Oportunidades, however, is not the…
What is multifactor productivity? Multifactor productivity (MFP) is a measure of real output per combined unit of labor and capital, reflecting the contributions of all factors of production. A change in multifactor productivity reflects the change in output that cannot be accounted for by the change in combined inputs. As a result, multifactor productivity measures…
From what areas does a hospital draw on to fill its beds? There have been many attempts to define a hospital’s catchment area. The Dartmouth Atlas Group uses hospital referral regions (HRRs) and hospital service areas (HSAs). One method is to determine a minimum admission rate for a given geographic unit (e.g., county, census tract,…