A Global Analysis of Within-Country Health Inequalities
Eran Bendavid and Grant Miller compare health inequalities in the US with 180 countries. In a study in JAMA Health Forum, they found that while global life expectancy inequality has declined since 1960, the US lags behind other high-income countries.
Unhappy With Your Health Insurance? Employer May Not Care
Although 58% of Americans rely on employer-sponsored health insurance, US corporations do surprisingly little to improve health-care options for their employees, according to research by GSB Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Sara Singer.
Strategies to Address Harms of Market-Driven Drug Development
Stanford Law’s Lisa Larrimore Ouellette and SHP’s Josh Salomon co-author report to address a persistent flaw in the U.S. health system: prioritizing treatment investment based on market potential rather than medical necessity.
Foreign Aid Sanctions Set Back Decades of Progress on Maternal, Child Mortality
Ruth Gibson and Paul Wise analyze three decades foreign aid sanctions to assess impact on health. They hope the work can help government officials better understand and address how foreign policy decisions affect the well-being of local populations.
The disruptive power of the pandemic has rippled across the social determinants of child health. Just several months after the first cases were detected in the United States, the unemployment rate reached levels not seen since the depths of the Great Depression, with the majority of lost jobs concentrated in low-wage industries. Two-thirds of child care centers closed by April 2020, one-third remaining closed by April 2021. Recent reports estimate that more than one-third of households with children were experiencing either housing hardships or inadequate food, privations that fell disproportionately on racial and ethnic minority families. School closures have been widespread with wildly uneven capacities to respond by district. This has resulted in disparities potentially affecting children’s long-term learning and patterns of mortality over the life course.
During COVID-19, the public health toll of vaccine misinformation has risen from bothersome to titanic. As many as 12 million persons may have forgone COVID-19 vaccination in the US because of misinformation, resulting in an estimated 1200 excess hospitalizations and 300 deaths per day. If 5 fully loaded 747s crashed each week due to wrong information, regulators would be apoplectic.
National Bureau of Economic Research,
February 1, 2022
Abstract
We study public vs. private provision of health care for veterans aged 65 and older who may receive care provided by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and in private hospitals financed by Medicare. Utilizing the ambulance design of Doyle et al. (2015), we find that the VA reduces 28-day mortality by 46% (4.5 percentage points) and that these survival gains are persistent. The VA also reduces 28-day spending by 21% and delivers strikingly different reported services relative to private hospitals. We find suggestive evidence of complementarities between continuity of care, health IT, and integrated care.
Stanford health law experts Michelle Mello and David Studdert discuss the ongoing pandemic, proof of vaccination “passports” at the state and federal levels, and a July 19 ruling that Indiana University could require that its students be vaccinated.
Digital contact tracing has the potential to limit the spread of COVID-19. A contact-tracing smartphone app that has been readily adopted by people in England and Wales has shown efficacy in reducing disease spread.
The New England Journal of Medicine ,
March 3, 2021
Now that a third COVID-19 vaccine has been given emergency-use authorization, Michelle Mello and colleagues ask whether individuals should be able to choose which vaccine they receive.
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy,
February 1, 2021
I study team decisions among physician trainees. Exploiting a discontinuity in team roles across trainee tenure, I find evidence that teams alter decision-making, concentrating influence in the hands of senior trainees. I also demonstrate little convergence in variation of trainee effects despite intensive training. This general pattern of trainee effects on team decision-making exists in all types of decisions and settings that I examine. In analyses evaluating mechanisms behind this pattern, I find support for the idea that significant experiential learning occurs during training and that teams place more weight on judgments of senior trainees in order to aggregate information.
