Health

Healthcare Economist Unbiased Analysis of Today’s Healthcare Issues

  • A Primer on Health Equity Research
    by Jason Shafrin on February 7, 2025 at 5:47 am

    According to the World Health Organization, “Three distinguishing features, when combined, turn mere variations or differences in health into a social inequity in health. They are systematic, socially produced (and therefore modifiable) and unfair. That is how an ISPOR Special Interest Group Report by Griffiths et al. (2025) begins. The health equity primer provides and…

  • What will be DOGE’s impact on CMS?
    by Jason Shafrin on February 6, 2025 at 7:00 am

    In a statement today, CMS confirmed that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been given access to CMS payment systems: CMS has two senior Agency veterans – one focused on policy and one focused on operations – who are leading the collaboration with DOGE, including ensuring appropriate access to CMS systems…

  • The Hidden Value of Adult Informal Care in Europe
    by Jason Shafrin on February 4, 2025 at 2:24 am

    That is the title of a paper from Costa-Font and Vilaplana-Prieto (2025). They find the the value is very large indeed. Relative to a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the value of IC [informal care] ranges between 4.2% in France and 0.85% in Germany. Such relative value declines as the country’s share of formal LTC…

  • How will CMS administer the IRA Medicare Drug Price Negotiation under Trump?
    by Jason Shafrin on February 3, 2025 at 1:31 am

    Some hints–and only hints–were provided in a CMS press release on Wednesday. Lowering the cost of prescription drugs for Americans is a top priority of President Trump and his Administration. In accordance with the statutory requirements of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the list of 15 drugs…

  • Improving the External Validity of Conjoint Analysis
    by Jason Shafrin on January 31, 2025 at 11:43 pm

    What is the impact of changing one treatment attribute on patient preferences for that treatment? This is a key question of interest for many patient preference studies. In practice, this is most often done by estimating the causal effect of changing one attribute of a profile while averaging over the distribution of the remaining profile…