Quality of care is difficult to measure. Even if you had a perfect measure of quality in terms of health outcomes, risk adjustment is imperfect. For instance, academic medical centers are often assumed to have high quality, but actual outcomes observed in the data may… Read More »Measuring Hospital Quality
Standard cost-effectiveness analysis assumes that any gain in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) should be valued equally. This does not sound unreasonable, but is it true in practice? Consider two potential violations of constant value of QALY gains: scope insensitivity and severity independence. I define each… Read More »Is the value of a QALY constant?
At first glance, John Cochrane makes a compelling case that pay toilets should not be illegal. The absence of pay toilets is in fact a delightful encapsulation of so much that is wrong with American economic policy these days. Activists decide free toilets are a… Read More »Should pay toilets be illegal?
A few facts: Pharma is increasingly a key driver of US R&D. Pharmaceutical firms share of R&D increased from <10% in the early 1970s to 24% in 2018 (among firms in Compustat data). Moreover, 5 out of top 10 largest R&D spenders in Compustat in… Read More »Why R&D expenses rising and productivity falling could be a good thing
Once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself. Yeonmi Park, escapee from North Korea, author of In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom
Budget impact models aim to let payers know how much a new drug will cost them. Clearly, payer cost depends on the dose. Some drugs are dosed the same for everyone. Other drugs are dosed based on patient weight, body surface area (BSA) or other… Read More »Incorporating weight-based dosing into a budget impact model
‘If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?’ This is a common parenting phrase is meant to motivate kids to reject peer’s actions that are bad behaviors. While this blogger will not comment how effective this parenting phrase is, peer effects are real.… Read More »Opioid abuse: Where you live matters
From John Maynard Keynes’ Essays in Biography: The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good,… Read More »What makes a great economist?
Results from a survey titled “Coronavirus Impact and Recovery of the Small Businesses Economy“, which has collected responses from over 520,000 business owners in the US and Canada. Some general positive trends, but still over 20% of small business owners have concerns of their financial… Read More »COVID-19 impact on small businesses: October 2020 Update