Concerned about Ebola? You’re worrying about the wrong disease
07 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: Ebola
Since the Ebola outbreak began in February, around 300,000 people have died from malaria, while tuberculosis has likely claimed over 600,000 lives.
Ebola might have our attention, but it’s not even close to being the biggest problem in Africa right now.
Even Lassa fever, which shares many of the terrifying symptoms of Ebola (including bleeding from the eyelids), kills many more than Ebola – and frequently finds its way to the US.
Ebola and you
01 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, health economics Tags: Ebola, media panic, The Great Escape
How do people become infected with the virus?
Ebola is transmitted through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals. In Africa infection in humans has happened as a result of contact with chimpanzees, gorillas, fruit bats, monkeys, forest antelope and porcupines found ill or dead in the rainforest.
The Ebola virus is fatal in 90 per cent of cases and there is no vaccine and no known cure.
Who is most at risk?
Those at risk during an outbreak include:
- health workers
- family members or others in close contact with infected people
- mourners with direct contact with the bodies of deceased victims
- hunters in contact with dead animals
What are the typical signs and symptoms?
Sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. That is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function and internal and external bleeding.
The incubation period is between two and 21 days.
A person will become contagious once they start to show symptoms. Once a person becomes infected, the virus can spread through contact with a sufferer’s blood, urine, saliva, stools and semen.
When should you seek medical care?
If a person is in an area affected by the outbreak, or has been in contact with a person known or suspected to have Ebola, they should seek medical help immediately.
What is the treatment?
Severely ill patients require intensive supportive care. They need intravenous fluids to rehydrate them. There is currently no specific treatment for the disease. Some patients will recover with the appropriate care.
Can Ebola be prevented?
Currently there is no licensed vaccine for Ebola. Several are being tested but are not available for clinical use.
Source: World Health Organisation via dailymail
Managerial Econ: Fee-for-service vs. capitation: 10 fewer amputations per capita
31 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: agent principal problems, asymmetric information, moral hazard
- Single-year mortality rates fell from 6.8 per cent in the traditional fee-for-service sample to 1.8 per cent
- Patients in the Medicare Advantage plans had shorter average stays in the hospital (about 19 per cent shorter.)
- Patients in the managed plans were more likely to receive preventive care …For example, diabetic patients in the fee-for-service sample had an average of 11.5 amputations per 1,000 patients; those in HMO plans with global capitation had only 0.3.
via Managerial Econ: Fee-for-service vs. capitation: 10 fewer amputations per capita.
Managerial Econ: Physician Induced Demand
31 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, health economics Tags: agent principal problems, asymmetric information, moral hazard, Physician Induced Demand
Rehavi and Johnson compare obstetricians’ choice of C-section during childbirth when the expectant mother is herself a medical doctor to when she is not. From their abstract:
… Consistent with PID [Physician Induced Demand], physicians are almost 10 per cent less likely to receive a C-section, with only a quarter of this effect attributable to differential sorting of patients to hospitals or obstetricians.
Ebola is not a major public health risk in a developed country
30 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: Ebola
- People need to be in intimate contact to spread the virus.
- Ebola is much harder to spread than respiratory infections, such as influenza or measles.
- Ebola also can only be spread by people with active symptoms.
People in developed countries seek treatment when they feel ill and submit to quarantine if diagnosed with a contagious disease.
HT: reason.com
Offsetting behaviour alert: school breakfast programmes
30 Jul 2014 1 Comment
in applied price theory, economics of education, health economics Tags: offsetting behaviour, school breakfast programmes
When children arrive at school without breakfast, being the dismal economist I am, the question I ask is not why they didn’t have breakfast – I ask whether their parents had breakfast.
If these children are getting a free breakfast because their parents are too poor to buy them breakfast food, why aren’t their parents invited to school to have a free breakfast as well. How do these parents eat at all? Any good parent would give up their breakfast for their children.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Mary Zaki in their just released Expanding the School Breakfast Program: Impacts on Children’s Consumption, Nutrition and Health look at the school lunch program is nearly universally available in U.S. public schools.
They use experimental data collected by the US Department of Agriculture to measure the impact of two policy innovations aimed at increasing access to the school breakfast program.
The first, universal free school breakfast, provides a hot breakfast before school (typically served in the school’s cafeteria) to all students regardless of their income eligibility for free or reduced-price meals.
The second is the Breakfast in the Classroom program that provides free school breakfast to all children to be eaten in the classroom during the first few minutes of the school day.
The study grouped schools into treated groups (school decided between breakfast in class and cafeteria-based) and control (had normal meal tested before school breakfast which serves free or reduced-price (maximum price of 30 cents) breakfast to those that are income-eligible and can be purchased at full price for those ineligible for a meal subsidy).
The study showed that breakfast in the classroom substantially increased participation in the school breakfast program and the likelihood a child eats a high-quality breakfast. However, there was no evidence for positive impacts on other outcomes, including: overall dietary quality, health, attendance rates, and test scores.
Both policies increase the take-up rate of school breakfast, though much of this reflects shifting breakfast consumption from home to school or the consumption of multiple breakfasts and relatively little of the increase is from students gaining access to breakfast.
Eating in breakfast at home when I was kid was a good chance to talk to my mum and dad and brothers and sisters, but I wasn’t much of a morning person, so I might be understating the benefits of having breakfast at home. I was always running late, so I would always say to mum on the way out to the car to go to school
Feed the cat
.
Everything is just getting better and better for men’s health
25 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics, technological progress Tags: medical progress, The Great Escape
HT: cato.org
Healthier, living longer but many more workers on disability benefits
07 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in health and safety, health economics, labour economics, labour supply, welfare reform Tags: disability benefits, moral hazard
In the past three decades, the number of people who are on disability benefit has skyrocketed.
There is no compelling evidence that the incidence of disabling health conditions among the working age population is rising. Autor (2006) found that disability rolls in the USA expanded because:
- congressional reforms to disability screening in 1984 that enabled workers with low mortality disorders such as back pain, arthritis and mental illness to more readily qualify for benefits;
- a rise in the after-tax income replacement rate, which strengthened the incentives for lower-skilled workers to seek benefits; (3) and
- a rapid increase in female labour force participation that expanded the pool of insured workers.
Autor found that the aging of the baby boom generation has contributed little to the growth of disability benefit numbers to date.
David Autor and Mark Duggan (2003) found that low-skills and a poor education is predictor of disability: in the USA in 2004, nearly one in five male high school dropouts between ages 55 and 64 were in the disability program; that was more than double that of high school graduates of the same age and more than five times higher than the 3.7 % of college graduates of that age who collect disability. Unemployment is another driver of disability.
The proportion of working-age people receiving a Sickness Benefit, an Invalid’s Benefit or Accident Compensation weekly compensation in New Zealand rose from around 1% in the 1970s to 5% in June 2002.
Figure 1 The Number of People Receiving Benefit as a Primary Recipient, All Age Groups, 1975–2005
Source: DSW Annual Reports or Statistical Information Reports and MSD SWIFFT data from Dwyer and McLeod (2006).
Most other OECD countries also experienced a rise in the proportion of the working-age population claiming incapacity benefits over this period. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was common for around 4–6.5% of the working-age population to receive such benefits. Some European countries have up to 10% of their working age population on disability or sickness benefit!
When the UK undertook reassessments of those on its disability and sickness benefit, fewer than one in 10 people assessed for the new sickness benefit has been deemed too ill to carry out any work.
More than a third of the 1.3million people who applied for Employment and Support Allowance were found to be fully capable of working; a similar proportion abandoned their claims while they were still being processed. Moral hazard seems to be the main explanation of the rise in disability roles.
Before 15 July 1980, a victim of a workplace accident in the state of Kentucky received a payment proportional to his or her wage with an upper limit of $131 per week. On 15 July 1980, the limit was raised to $217 per week. This increase made a considerable difference to the best-paid workers: their periods of convalescence grew 20% longer (Cahuc and Zylberberg 2006).
The value of a statistical life through time in the USA
06 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, environmental economics, health economics, technological progress, Thomas Schelling, transport economics Tags: Thomas Schelling, value of life
Thomas Schelling’s crucial contribution in 1968 at RAND was the notion of statistical lives—mortality risks—in contrast to valuing the lives of specific, identified individuals. His insight was that economists could evade the moral thicket of valuing life and instead focus on people’s willingness to trade-off money for small reductions in the risks they face.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments