Personalised medicine appears to be an inevitable future of health care, and economists aren’t ready for it. It has various monikers and related concepts including precision medicine, stratified medicine, pharmacogenomics, pharmacogenetics and predictive medicine. But, whatever you call it, it means big… Read More »Economics of personalised medicine: an introduction
Economists need data. In this post I want to introduce those of you who don’t know it to a magnificent data source – quandl.com. Quandl is an open source website that indexes a huge range of data – over 6,000,000… Read More »Data everywhere! – Introduction to Quandl
By Chris Sampson, David Whitehurst and Andrew Street In December 2012, an article was published in The European Journal of Health Economics with the title ‘Patients whose GP knows complementary medicine tend to have lower costs and live longer’. We… Read More »Bad science in health economics: complementary medicine, costs and mortality
This month’s meeting will take place Monday 3rd June, at 5pm London time. That’ll be midday in Boston and 6pm in Geneva. Join the Facebook event here. We’ll also hold an antipodal meeting 12 hours later on Tuesday 4th June, at… Read More »#HEJC for 03/06/2013
Economics is largely about trade-offs and compromise. Academics study the former but don’t often engage in the latter. In health economics, as in other fields, a key trade-off is between equity and efficiency. We’ve been studying this for a.very.long.time. Despite this, as… Read More »The potential of the super QALY to reconcile the key contentions in health economics
An argument that often comes up when it comes to the distribution of scarce health resources is who should receive them. Many different arguments are posed with varying degrees of sophistication. Various studies have elicited population preferences for distributing scarce… Read More »To whom the benefits?
This month’s meeting will take place Monday 6th May, at 5pm London time. That’ll be 11am in New Orleans and 7pm in Athens. Join the Facebook event here. We’ll also hold an antipodal meeting 12 hours later on Tuesday 7th May,… Read More »#HEJC for 06/05/2013
In a previous post I considered whether the current Great Recession had been good for your health. Evidence suggests that temporary reductions in income may improve your health for a number of reasons. In part, when I lose my job… Read More »Hidden costs of the recession
There have been a good number of articles to document the phenomenon of a counter-cyclical relationship between unemployment and health. As unemployment rises, deaths from a number of causes have been found to decline. These include accidents, infant mortality, heart… Read More »Is this recession good for your health?
A recent article by Benjamin Ho and Sita Nataraj Slavov, which I picked up via Marginal Revolution, argues that health inequality is falling. The argument is that life expectancy for the 1% dying at the bottom end of the age-at-death distribution has increased… Read More »A comment on health inequality