Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Hank Stern of InsureBlog hosts this week’s “Pink edition” Health Wonk Review. Check it out. Also of note this week is that Richard Thaler has the 2017 Nobel prize in economics. For more on Dr. Thaler’s work, check out the Nobel Prize website.
Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, Michael W. Young. The three Nobel prize winners received their prize for their work understanding the molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm. As summarized in the Nobel prize announcement: Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year’s Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm.…
Yoshinori Ohsumi. He won the award for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. What is autophagy? The Nobel Prize website explains: The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto-, meaning “self”, and phagein, meaning “to eat”. Thus,autophagy denotes “self eating”. This concept emerged during the 1960’s, when researchers first observed that the cell could…
…Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their research on contract theory. One of my favorite papers in all of economics is Holmstrom and Milgrom’s 1991 paper titled “Multitask Principal-Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design.” In a world where health care is increasingly moving to value-based payment, payers (i.e., insurance companies, employers, and the government) are increasingly…
The Nobel prize for medicine honored breakthroughs in understanding how key substances are moved around within a cell. Each cell is a factory that produces and exports molecules. For instance, insulin is manufactured and released into the blood and signaling molecules called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another. That process happens through…
When cells become specialized cells (e.g., blood cells, bone cells, sex cells), are these cells fixed and immutable? In the past, researchers though the answer was yes. It turns out, that cells can draw on their DNA to become amazingly flexible. This breakthrough is due in large part for this year’s Nobel Prize winners, Sir…
Two months ago I was standing in Stockholm’s Stadshuset (City Hall). Soon, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims will be there as well. The pair, however, will be accepting the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics. Although I am not a macroeconomist myself, Marginal Revolution has a good description of the pair. Thomas Sargent. Christopher Sims. My…
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…
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Robert G. Edwards, the inventor of in vitro fertilization (IVF). According to the Nobel Prize press release: “Robert Edwards is awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for the development of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) therapy. His achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition…
Today, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University and Oliver E. Williamson of the University of California, Berkeley won the Nobel prize in Economics. Dr. Ostrom won “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” and Dr. Williamson “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm.” According to the N.Y. Times: The…