Tag Archives: health

from Dean Baker I’m not one to generally tout the wisdom of the economics discipline, but it actually does offer some useful insights into the likely motive for the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare (UHC). According to media accounts, the suspect, Luigi Mangione, was angered by his own and others’ experiences being turned down when submitting claims for healthcare service. United and other insurers make a profit by restricting the claims they pay, so their profit...

To the death toll of the violence in Gaza, around 15.000 additional deaths of infants and children between 1 and 5 have to be added. This is a rough and, in my opinion, a lower-bound estimate. However, the calculations are based on robust information, and sizeable additional mortality in infants and young children in Gaza is real. Next to the direct victims of war, there are indirect victims who die because of lack of proper medical care or because of harsh circumstances. Here, I´ll...

In 2019 the age-adjusted death rate from an opioid overdose was 21.6 per 100,000 people. This compares with 12.9 for kidney disease, 14.2 from suicides, 14.7 for influenza, 21.6 from diabetes, and 161.5 from heart disease (the leading cause of death in the United States). Opioid overdose deaths place in the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States. As can been from Figure 1, prior to 2015 most of these opioid deaths arose from prescription (Rx) overdoses, but after that they came...

It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence...

Pesticides are linked to negative health outcomes, but a causal relationship is difficult to establish due to nonrandom pesticide exposure. I use a peculiar ecological phenomenon, the mass emergence of cicadas in 13 and 17-year cycles across the eastern half of the US, to estimate the short and long-term impacts of pesticides. With a triple-difference setup that leverages the fact that cicadas only damage tree crops and not agricultural row crops, I show that insecticide use increases with...

The latest I’ve seen on the Uganda election is that ballot counting continues, I thought I saw police had disrupted counting at at least one location, and opposition candidate, singer Bobi Wine says the military has stationed themselves in and around his home without explanation. My boss, Annie Duflo, is profiled in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. Charles Kenny has a new paper and blog post out arguing aid would help the most people if it prioritized the poorest places first. He also...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Last week I mentioned the new COVID research RECOVR hub, which was still in development. This week it’s been launched officially, to help development researchers share information about ongoing studies, survey instruments, and funding opportunities. If you are doing related work, please share or have a look at what other researchers are doing so we can build on one another’s work. A great initiative from the Busara Center, “Give...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action First some good news – congratulations to development economist and dewormer Ted Miguel, social psychologist of diversity and justice Jennifer Richeson, gynecologist and Nobel laureate, Denis Mukwege of the DRC, and the other newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For researchers working on (or interested in working on COVID in low- and middle-income countries): to facilitate collaboration, with...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Remember to fill out your U.S. Census form if you got a mailing! Of course accurate counts are important for apportioning leadership and federal resources, but more importantly (as someone else pointed out) so that researchers 80 years from now looking at historical trends won’t pull out their hair in frustration of the lost 2020 census data the same way ones today do about the 1890 census data fire. The Dev Impact blog had a pair...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. It’s a little tricky to write links when it feels like things are changing hourly. Here’s the main message to keep in mind for the research community – you can do more than idle your projects. COVID-19 will affect every aspect of development, health, education, entrepreneurship, mobile money, cash transfers, political systems and trust in authority. But, if you have a research expertise in some area of development, now’s the time...