Austin Frakt

If you’re the score-keeping type and a fan of health economics, you might like the recent paper by Adam Wagstaff and Anthony Culyer, titled “Four decades of health economics through a bibliometric lens.” (An ungated working paper pdf is here.) It includes lists of the top health economics papers (300 of them), health economists (100), […]

Earlier today, Sarah Kliff reported that “nurse practitioners are rolling out a campaign this week to explain what, exactly, nurse practitioners do — and why patients should trust them with their medical needs.” Anticipating a shortage of physicians, nurses are asserting that they can help fill the void. Though not the same as nurse practitioners, […]

New from the Journal of Economic Perspectives: “Why Is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter?” (ungated pdf) by Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine: Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some […]

Who among us could fail to enjoy an article that includes this: Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant’s fingers along with a patient’s leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with […]

Zirui Song and Bruce Landon summarize the state of Massachusetts’ health care costs (high) and what state officials are attempting to do about it (a lot). Their short New England Journal of Medicine piece is ungated, so you can read it for yourself. The following two statistics caught me by surprise: 1. The five organizations […]

From a 2009 paper by Keith Humphreys, Alex Harris, and Daniel Kivlahan: Consider two related questions: (1) Why are there no bad restaurants in San Francisco? and (2) Why do prison cafeterias serve lousy food? The answer to the first question is that San Francisco has a large number of people who eat out frequently […]

The Conference Board of Canada has recently updated its Health Outcomes by Country report cards using the latest data from the OECD. They score themselves a B. Guess which country is at the bottom of the list? The details are here. I wrote about a prior version of this report card in 2010. Interestingly, the […]

A fairly standard position is that we should implement more cost control before embarking on coverage expansion. A variation on this idea is that getting costs down will itself help expand coverage, not all the way to universality, but a bit. I’m skeptical that a “cost control first” approach is politically viable, but let’s put […]

From Robert Pear and Jonathan Weisman: Republicans are dusting off proposals that date back more than a decade: allowing individuals to buy health insurance across state lines, helping small businesses band together to buy insurance, offering generous tax deductions for the purchase of individual policies, expanding tax-favored health savings accounts and reining in medical malpractice […]

If you’ve read Albert Brooks’ 2030 (or even if you haven’t), you might be concerned about what an aging population means for America’s future. If so, Henry Aaron’s Longer life spans: boon or burden? (ungated pdf, Dædalus 2006) might provide some relief. The first step in dealing with the ‘aging problem’ is to avoid public […]