In 2013, before the Affordable Care Act helped millions get health insurance, California’s Placer County provided limited health care to some 3,400 uninsured residents who couldn’t afford to see a doctor. For several years, that number has been zero in the predominantly white, largely rural county stretching from Sacramento’s eastern suburbs to the shores of…
As we start off 2026, I wanted to quickly look back at the research that I published in peer-reviewed journals last year. Here’s the list: Shafrin J, Jadhav K, Warren C, Quddus S, Zawadzki N, Yang D, Damon A, Spurrier K, Batt K, Wei D. Chronic myeloid leukemia treatment intolerance imposes additional resource and economic…
ORANGE, California — Una mañana reciente, Carmen Basu, abrigada con una chaqueta roja y una bufanda de lana, se paró frente a la sede del plan de salud local, luego de recoger alimentos gratuitos. Había traído a su esposo, a su hijo adolescente y a su suegra de 79 años para que la ayudaran. Tomaron…
Jonna Quinn was initially thrilled when she got her first job after her medical residency, working as an OB-GYN in Mason City, Iowa. It was less than two hours down the road from West Bend, where she grew up on a farm. But the hospital started restricting certain birth control options and fertility treatments based…
When Matthew Hurley was looking to take PrEP to prevent HIV, the doctor hadn’t heard of the medicine, and when he finally did prescribe PrEP, the bills sent to Hurley were expensive … and wrong. “I decided to write in because the process was really super frustrating.” At one point, Hurley asked, “Am I just…
By STEVEN ZECOLA On December 19th, the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) issued a Request for Information seeking to harness artificial intelligence (“AI”) to deflate health care costs and make America healthy again. As described herein, AI can be used in many dimensions to help lower healthcare costs and improve care. However, to…
That is the title of a recent paper by Schneider and Sutter (2026). While many people are familiar with the concept of risk aversion, the dispersion of outcomes (i.e., risk) is not the only thing that matters. The skewness of distribution (prudence) and risk in the tails of the distribution (temperance) matters. For instance, prudent…
Lenia Watson-Burton, a 37-year-old U.S. Navy administrator, expected that cosmetic surgery would get rid of stubborn fat quickly and easily — just as the web advertising promised. Instead, she died three days after a liposuction-like procedure called AirSculpt at the San Diego office of Elite Body Sculpture, a cosmetic surgery chain with more than 30…
Clinical trials focus in-sample (direct) effect of vaccines on health outcomes (e.g., decrease in illness, hospitalization, emergency department use, and death). Typically, however, clinical trials do not test whether the vaccines reduce transmission. FDA do not require this as it would be logistically challenging and costly to estimate indirect effects of vaccination within a clinical…
Rural Emergency Hospitals (REHs) are a new Medicare provider type created to preserve essential emergency and outpatient access in rural communities where low inpatient volume makes full-service hospitals financially unsustainable. They receive enhanced outpatient payments and a fixed monthly facility payment in exchange for forgoing acute inpatient care. CMS has an REH fact sheet that…