Category: Uncategorized

The answer may be ‘yes’. Since immigrants make up a disproportionate share of health care workers–particularly for the elderly–restricting the number of immigrants may lower the quality and increase the cost of health care in the U.S. That is the finding of a recent study by Zallman et al. (2019) in Health Affairs: Using nationally…

It appears that not only does your friend’s behavior affect your behavior, but your perception of their behavior–independent from their actual behavior–affects your behavior. Want a concrete example of this? A paper by Amialchuk et al. (2019) finds the following: Using a nationally representative dataset, we estimate the effect of misperception about friends’ alcohol, smoking,…

An interesting white paper on how to demonstrated value to payers when examining gene therapies has hit the presses. My colleagues Jeremy Schafer, PhD, and Alexander Grosvenor, PhD have written a guide to help you: Understand the disparities between payer and manufacturer expectations for long-term outcomes Determine which elements of treatment are included in the…

The patient-physician relationship is one built on trust. Physicians will advise patients of treatment options and patients will weigh their own preferences and thoughts against the physician’s recommendations. If you trust your physician, you probably will follow their recommendations more frequently; if you do not trust them, you may side with your gut instinct more…

A policy paper by the HHS describing proposals to promote choice and competition in health care. Before getting into policy recommendations, however, it outlines how increased provider consolidation has lead to less choice. One recent study by Gaynor et al. …found that the mean HHI [Herfindahl-Hirschman Index] across MSAs in the inpatient hospital industry increased…

I recently started reading a fascinating book Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA by Daniel Carpenter. As I read through it, I will be highlighting interesting points throughout. One key point is that while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates pharmaceuticals in the US, how it does so influences…

Prescription drug price board in MD. Opioid use disorder in WV. Legal cannabis market in Africa. Good resource: KFF State Health Facts Withdrawing ACA lawsuit in WI.

According to a paper by Wen et al. (2019) in this month’s Health Affairs, a large number of people with mental health issues. Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health for the period 2014–16, we found that people with behavioral health and other chronic health conditions were more likely to be…

One of the challenges of single payer systems is that individuals do not have a choice of insurance. If you don’t like the single-payer plan, too bad. Free marketers would argue that in the commercially insured market, threat of competition ‘insures’ (pun intended) that health insurers are efficient and not funding fraud, waste and abuse.…