Category: Health Economics

Richa Upadhyay, Stanford University -- One in four Americans report that they or a family member struggles to afford healthcare. The American healthcare industry is facing a critical need to control costs and incentivize high-quality care. Empty hospitals and shorter stays should be seen as a sign of efficient healthcare provision and improved population health rather than a revenue red flag. States must align financial and public health incentives through global budgeting, a form of value-based care, to tie hospital payments to health outcomes. 

Sophia Barthel, Emory University -- While developing new drugs is crucial for public health, there is a tension between incentivizing innovation (i.e., profit for pharmaceutical companies) and ensuring life-saving drugs are affordable. Pharmaceutical price gouging has drawn the public’s ire in recent years. Moreover, US spending on prescription drugs increased more than tenfold between 1980 and 2018, due in large part to the fact that drug prices in the US are 2.3 times higher than those present in other OECD countries on average. Thus, it is imperative that policymakers balance the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invent new drugs with ensuring those drugs are affordable and accessible.

Kyle Feinstein, Stanford University -- At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, America fell ill to a critical shortage of nurses. At its core, the shortage was an economic disease, and it was spreading. Within months, the global shortage of nurses, estimated at 5.9 million nurses, climbed to a staggering 13 million. The scarcity caused nurses to be deployed out of their specialty. Hospitals were pushed to invest copious funds into contract nurses to alleviate the workload. High turnover rates spawned discontinuity issues, giving rise to safety concerns. This cascade of challenges forced hospitals to limit services and jeopardized the most central responsibility of healthcare providers: patient outcomes.

VinhHuy Le, Stanford University -- In 2010, the world’s largest tobacco conglomerate descended on an international courtroom ready to fight. Philip Morris International, the company behind cigarette brands like Malboro and Chesterfield, sued the South American country of Uruguay for $25 million. But why pick on a country whose entire GDP at the time was half the size of Philip Morris’ net worth?

Richa Upadhyay, Stanford University -- Most people can name the nation’s most prominent health systems such as Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, and Trinity Health. Hospital mergers and acquisitions continue to make the “household names” of healthcare stronger, but such consolidation often comes at the expense of consumers. More often than not, hospital acquisitions fail to improve health outcomes while raising costs for patients and payers due to decreased competition.