Healthcare Economics

• Payer-provider vertical integration: Trends, tradeoffs, and policy options Brookings Institution, YouTube, May 19, 2025
• Retirees, Get Ready to Need Long-Term Care. Here’s What to Know. By Mark Miller, The New York Times, May 24, 2025
• Is There Really a Chronic Disease Epidemic? It’s Complicated. By Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times, May 22, 2025
• How ‘Health Freedom’ Became a Winning Rallying Cry By Kate Morgan, The New York Times, December 31, 2024 [For decades, vaccine skeptics were a vocal protest movement. Now, they find themselves much closer to power.]
• America’s Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates By Daniel Bergner, The New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2024 
• What’s Behind the Remarkable Drop in U.S. Overdose Deaths By Jan Hoffman and Noah Weiland, The New York Times, November 21, 2024
  
• The Campaign Issue That Isn’t: Health Care Reform By Margot Sanger-Katz, The New York Times, Sep. 14, 2024
• 2024 Sargan Lecture: Health Inequality and Health Types By Mariacristina De Nardi, Royal Economic Society, YouTube, May 23, 2024
  
• South Korean Doctors Walk Out, Protesting Plan to Increase Their Ranks By Jin Yu Young, The New York Times, February 19, 2024
  
• Primary care saves lives. Here’s why it’s failing Americans. By Frances Stead Sellers, The Washington Post, October 17, 2023
  
• How Do We Fix the Scandal That Is American Health Care? By Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, August 16, 2023
  
• How much money do doctors really make and why is it such a lot? By Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post, August 4, 2023
  
• Financiers bought up anesthesia practices, then raised prices By Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post, June 29, 2023
  
• The Moral Crisis of America’s Doctors By Eyal Press, The New York Times Magazine, June 16, 2023 [The corporatization of health care has changed the practice of medicine, causing many physicians to feel alienated from their work.]
  
• Senior care is crushingly expensive. Boomers aren’t ready. By Christopher Rowland, The Washington Post, March 18, 2023 
• How Being Sick Changed My Health Care Views By Ross Douthat, The New York Times, January 19, 2022
  
• Why Cash Is Better Than Expanded Health Insurance for the Poor  By Amy Finkelstein, The New York Times, May 13, 2021
  
• Vaccines
  
• Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines  By Tynan DeBold and Dov Friedman, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11, 2015 [Terrific heat maps showing the impact of vaccines, pre-COVID.]
•  Measles outbreak erupts in one of Texas’ least vaccinated counties By Beth Mole, Ars Technica, February 7, 2025
• Polio outbreak spreads in Pakistan as militants target vaccination teams By Haq Nawaz Khan, Rick Noack and Shaiq Hussain, The Washington Post, January 29, 2025
  
• RFK Jr. disparaged vaccines dozens of times in recent years and made baseless claims on race By Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert, The Washington Post, January 29, 2025
• Hawaii Governor, a Doctor, Blames Kennedy for Measles Deaths in Samoa By Elizabeth Williamson, The New York Times, January 28, 2025
  
• 13 Questions Kennedy Must Answer, According to Experts By New York Times Opinion, The New York Times, January 28, 2025
  
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• Lifestyle
• Does taxing sugary drinks result in better health outcomes? What some cities have found PBS NewsHour, YouTube, May 24, 2025
• Diabetes and Heart Disease Rise Alongside Sugary Drink Consumption By Andrew Jacobs, The New York Times, January 6, 2025
  
• Pharmaceutical Business
• Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids By Chris Hamby, The New York Times, December 17, 2024
• Insurance
• Loss of insurance from GOP bill could mean more than 100,000 deaths By Natasha Sarin, The Washington Post, June 9, 2025
• Why Patients Are Being Forced to Switch to a 2nd-Choice Obesity Drug By Rebecca Robbins and Reed Abelson, The New York Times, May 11, 2025
• RFK Jr.: If you eat doughnuts or smoke, should society pay for your health care? By Lauren Weber, The Washington Post, April 10, 2025
• How US citizens are affected by a profit-driven healthcare system | The Stream Al Jazeera English, YouTube, February 14, 2025
• Health Insurers Deny 850 Million Claims a Year. The Few Who Appeal Often Win. By Julie Wernau, The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2025
• Insurance is what makes U.S. health-care prices so high By David Goldhill, The Washington Post, December 26, 2024
  
• How American Health Insurance Got So Infuriating By David Wainer, The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2024
  
• Health Insurance is a Racket: What value do these companies add, really? By Paul Krugman, Krugman Wonks Out (Substack), Dec 18, 2024
  
• I Was a Health Insurance Executive. What I Saw Made Me Quit. By Wendell Potter, The New York Times, December 18, 2024 
• UnitedHealth Group C.E.O.: The Health Care System Is Flawed. Let’s Fix It. By Andrew Witty, The New York Times, December 13, 2024
  
• The Issues with Health Insurance Companies, Explained by Doctors The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2024 [Focuses on pre-authorization.] 
  
• Most Americans Say They Have Good Health Insurance, Polls Show By Kaleigh Rogers, The New York Times, December 13, 2024 
• ‘What’s My Life Worth?’ The Big Business of Denying Medical Care Video by Alexander Stockton, The New York Times, March 14, 2024
  
• Drug Patents
• How a Drug Maker Profited by Slow-Walking a Promising H.I.V. Therapy By Rebecca Robbins and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, July 22, 2023 [Gilead delayed a new version of a drug, allowing it to extend the patent life of a blockbuster line of medications, internal documents show.]
• Drug Prices
• Sarah Huckabee Sanders: My State Is Taking On the Middlemen Who Inflate Drug Prices By Sarah Huckabee Sanders, The New York Times, June 10, 2025
• How America Built the World’s Most Successful Market for Generic Drugs  by  Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (blog), May 30, 2025
• The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugs By Rebecca Robbins and Reed Abelson, The New York Times, June 21, 2024 [This is the first article in a series about how pharmacy benefit managers prioritize their interests, often at the expense of patients, employers and taxpayers.]
  
• Why Are US Drug Prices So High? The Human Action Podcast, MisesMedia, YouTube, May 19, 2025 [Interview of Alex Tabarrok]
• The real cost of Trump’s cheap drug promise By Eduardo Porter, The Washington Post, May 20, 2025
• The Risks of Adopting Foreign Price Controls for Drugs  By Kristian Stout, Truth on the Market, May 09, 2025
• the middlemen: The Powerful Companies Driving Local Drugstores Out of Business By Reed Abelson and Rebecca Robbins, The New York Times, Oct. 19, 2024
  
• As drug middlemen influence grows, independent pharmacies face fresh challenges By McKenzie Beard, The Washington Post, October 11, 2024
  
• Senators press Novo Nordisk CEO on why Ozempic and Wegovy cost less abroad By Daniel Gilbert, The Washington Post, September 24, 2024 
• The US Has Low Prices for Most Prescription Drugs By Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (blog), September 24, 2025
• Our Reporter on How Pharmacy Benefit Managers Work  By Rebecca Robbins, Claire Hogan, Christina Shaman and James Surdam, June 21, 2024 
• Six Reasons Drug Prices Are So High in the U.S. By Rebecca Robbins and Christina Jewett, The New York Times, Jan. 17, 2024 [Research shows prices in the United States are nearly double those in other well-off countries.]
  
• ‘Miracle’ Cystic Fibrosis Drug Kept Out of Reach in Developing Countries By Stephanie Nolen and Rebecca Robbins, The New York Times, February 7, 2023 
• Drug Prices by Committee: One Way Biden Could Lower Costs By Austin Frakt, The New York Times, Feb. 12, 2021
  
• An Indian Drug Mogul Says Americans Will Pay Too Much for the Covid Vaccine—and Wants to Change That By SARAH WHEATON, Politico Magazine, 7/19/2020
  
• Generic Drug Maker Admits to Fixing Prices for Cholesterol Medication  By Katie Benner, The New York Times, May 7, 2020
• Why Is Medicine So Expensive? By Daniel J. Kevles, The New York Review of Books, February 21, 2019. [The system of prescription drug pricing is a patchwork product of history, vulnerable to manipulation by the pharmaceutical industry.]
  
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• Medicaid
• We Saw Medicaid Work Requirements Up Close. You Don’t Want This Chaos. By Kevin De Liban and Trevor Hawkins, The New York Times, June 8, 2025
• As Congress Debates Cutting Medicaid, a Major Study Shows It Saves Lives By Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, The New York Times, May 16, 2025 [The most extensive research on Medicaid coverage to date found that it reduced the risk of death by 21 percent.]
• The Effects of Medicaid Expansions on Mortality of Low-Income Adults No-Spin Evidence Review, June 10, 2025
• People with disabilities explain how Medicaid cuts could impact their lives PBS NewsHour, YouTube, April 28, 2025
• The Three States That Are Especially Stuck if Congress Cuts Medicaid By Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, The New York Times, April 6, 2025
• Medicaid Insures Millions of Americans. How the Health Program Works, in Charts. By Anna Wilde Mathews and Paul Overberg with Graphics by Elizaveta Galkina, The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2025
• The Big Secret About Medicaid: It’s a Middle-Class Benefit By Ron Lieber, The New York Times, March 21, 2025
• What to Know About Medicaid By Abby Goodnough, The New York Times, February 26, 2025
• Why the South has such low credit scores By Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post, February 17, 2023
  
• Medicaid Enrollment Surpassed 80 Million, a Record, During the Pandemic By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times, June 22, 2021
  
• Medicare
• Rep. AOC Breaks Down Medicare Advantage RepAOC, YouTube, May 20, 2025
• Medicare Bleeds Billions on Pricey Bandages, and Doctors Get a Cut By Sarah Kliff and Katie Thomas, The New York Times, April 11, 2025
• Bridging the Medicare Cost Gap: Knowing Your Options By Mark Miller, The New York Times, February 15, 2025
• Insurers Pocketed $50 Billion From Medicare for Diseases No Doctor Treated By Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty, Anna Wilde Mathews and Mark Maremont, The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2024 [Questionable diagnoses of HIV and other maladies triggered extra Medicare Advantage payments; ‘It’s anatomically impossible’]
• Medicare Versus the Insurance Industry: A Privatization-Driven Arms Race: Forty years of gaming the system By Paul Krugman, paulkrugman.substack.com, January 7, 2025
  
• Medicare Advantage Myth-Busting By Brandon Novick, March 14, CEPR, 2024
  
• A Huge Threat to the U.S. Budget Has Receded. And No One Is Sure Why. By Margot Sanger-Katz, Alicia Parlapiano and Josh Katz, The New York Times, Sep. 4, 2023
  
• That $56,000 Drug? Blame Medicare. By Amy Finkelstein, The New York Times, August 20, 2021
  
• New Drug Could Cost the Government as Much as It Spends on NASA By Josh Katz, Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, The New York Times, June 22, 2021
  
• The Attack on an Alzheimer’s Drug By The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2021
  
• When Medicare Choices Get ‘Pretty Crazy,’ Many Seniors Avert Their Eyes By Mark Miller, The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2020
• Medicare for All
• We’re Already Paying for Universal Health Care. Why Don’t We Have It? By Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, The New York Times, July 18, 2023
  
• The Basics of ‘Medicare for All’  By Margot Sanger-Katz, The New York Times, Feb. 26, 2020
• Would Your Wages Rise Under ‘Medicare for All’?  By Austin Frakt, The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2020
• Open letter from top economists: Medicare for All would lead to massive savings for most Americans and slash waste in healthcare  By Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Business Insider, Mar. 10, 2020
• Strikes and Attack Ads: The Hard Roads to Universal Health Care  By Quoctrung Bui and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times, March 10, 2020
• Single-Payer Health Care Did Not Fail in Vermont By Lee Russ, The Progressive, March 4, 2020
  
• Why Vermont’s single-payer effort failed and what Democrats can learn from it By Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post, April 29, 2019
• Why Bernie Sanders' Single-Payer Health Care Plan Failed In Vermont All Things Considered, NPR, September 13, 2017
  
• Comparing National Healthcare Systems
  
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• Australia's universal healthcare is crumbling. Can it be saved? By Tiffanie Turnbull, BBC News, April 26, 2025
• Quality Care in Perspective: Children’s Hospitals By Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Insight, American Action Forum, March 4, 2025
• See Reality Check-Up: The Truth About Single-Payer Systems
• Random Critical Analysis blog with articles on healthcare controversies
  
• U.S. ranks last in health care compared with nine other high-income countries, report finds By Berkeley Lovelace Jr., NBC News, September 19, 2024 
• Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System By David Blumenthal, Evan D. Gumas, Arnav Shah, Munira Z. Gunja, Reginald D. Williams II, The Commonwealth Fund, September 19, 2024
• What experts say about who has the world's best health-care system | Opinion The Washington Post, YouTube, June 17, 2021
  
• Politicians Ruined a Brilliant Example of Universal Health Care By Adam Westbrook, NYT Opinion, YouTube, December 7, 2023
  
• A tale of two sisters, two countries and their health systems By Frances Stead Sellers and Catarina Fernandes Martins, The Washington Post, Oct. 17, 2023  
  
• A National Treasure, Tarnished: Can Britain Fix Its Health Service? By Mark Landler, The New York Times, July 16, 2023
  
• I Studied Five Countries’ Health Care Systems. We Need to Get More Creative With Ours. By Aaron E. Carroll, The New York Times, June 13, 2023
  
• ‘Why Is It So Expensive?’  Video by Chai Dingari, Adam Westbrook and Brendan Miller, The New York Times, May 15, 2021 [See also https://youtu.be/EBklyksgbco.]
  
•  Maternal Mortality and Maternity Care in the United States Compared to 10 Other Developed Countries By Roosa Tikkanen, Munira Z. Gunja, Molly FitzGerald, and Laurie Zephyrin, The Commonwealth Fund, November 18, 2020
  
• Where Health Care Is a Human Right By Nathan Whitlock, The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2020. [How does the single-payer system work in Canada, and does it need reform?]
• Health Care: The Best and the Rest By David Oshinsky, The New York Review of Books, October 22, 2020 [Ezekiel Emanuel’s new book, Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care?, makes a comparative study of eleven of the world’s health care systems. Who are the winners and losers?]
• Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care? A Conversation with Zeke Emanuel The Aspen Institute, YouTube, June 30, 2020
• Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries? By Max Roser, Our World in Data, October 29, 2020
  
• Should U.S. look to UK's single-payer National Health Service for next health care moves? PBS NewsHour, September 1, 2020
  
• COMING SOON: U.S. Health Care: Best in the World? PBS NewsHour, August 31, 2020
  
• Is U.S. health care the best or 'least effective' system in the modern world? PBS NewsHour, August 31, 2020
• In the UK’s health system, rationing isn’t a dirty word  By Ezra Klein, vox.com, Jan 28, 2020
• The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private  By Dylan Scott, vox.com, Jan 17, 2020
• Two sisters. Two different journeys through Australia’s health care system.  By Dylan Scott, vox.com, Jan 15, 2020
• Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America  By Dylan Scott, vox.com, Jan 13, 2020
• Obamacare
• Obamacare worked. The nation should double down. By The Editorial Board, The Washington Post, February 18, 2024
  
• Bidencare Is a Really Big Deal By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, January 25, 2024
  
• Donald Trump Still Wants to Kill Obamacare. Why? By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, November 30, 2023
• It’s Boom Times for Obamacare. Will They Last? By Noah Weiland, The New York Times, January 26, 2024
• Biden’s Hidden Health Care Triumph By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, February 10, 2022
  
• Obamacare, in Its First Big Test as Safety Net, Is Holding Up So Far By Margot Sanger-Katz, Sarah Kliff and Quoctrung Bui, The New York Times, Dec. 29, 2020
• Obamacare Versus the G.O.P. Zombies By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, June 29, 2020
• Republicans Killed the Obamacare Mandate. New Data Shows It Didn’t Really Matter. By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times, Sept. 18, 2020
  
• Hospitals
• Inside one of the largest hospital scandals in US history | Gutted | Fault Lines Documentary Al Jazeera English, May 13, 2025
• They Were Entitled to Free Care. Hospitals Hounded Them to Pay. By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas, The New York Times, Sept. 24, 2022
• How a Company Makes Millions Off a Hospital Program Meant to Help the Poor By Ellen Gabler, The New York Times, January 16, 2025
• Most Rural Hospitals Have Closed Their Maternity Wards, Study Finds By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times, December 5, 2024
• Senate report: How private equity ‘gutted’ dozens of U.S. hospitals By Bethany McLean, The Washington Post, October 17, 2024
• 'You're not God': Doctors and patient families say HCA hospitals push hospice care By Gretchen Morgenson, NBC News, June 21, 2023
  
• This Is Why Nursing Homes Failed So Badly By E. Tammy Kim, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2020
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• Bidencare Would Be a Big Deal By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, October 5, 2020
  
• Employer-Based Health Care, Meet Massive Unemployment By Jeneen Interlandi, The New York Times, June 29, 2020
  
• Bottomless Pinocchio: Trump’s claim that he will ‘always’ protect those with preexisting conditions By Salvador Rizzo, The Washington Post, June 29, 2020
  
• A Shadow Medical Safety Net, Stretched to the Limit  By Mattathias Schwartz, The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2020
• First, the coronavirus pandemic took their jobs. Then, it wiped out their health insurance.  By Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post, April 18, 2020
• How Big Pharma Grew Addicted to Big Profits  By Natasha Singer, The New York Times, March 12, 2020 [Review of "PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America" By Gerald Posner]
• I’m an E.R. Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same.  By Helen Ouyang, The New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2020
• America Can Afford a World-Class Health System. Why Don’t We Have One? By Anne Case and Angus Deaton, The New York Times, April 14, 2020
• A Corporate Merger Cost America Ventilators By Tim Wu, The New York Times, April 12, 2020
• The U.S. Approach to Public Health: Neglect, Panic, Repeat  By Jeneen Interlandi, The New York Times, April 9, 2020
• The Health System We’d Have if Economists Ran Things by Austin Frakt, The New York Times, February 17, 2020
• The answer to America’s health care cost problem might be in Maryland By Tara Golshan, vox.com, Jan 22, 2020
• Opinion: The U.S. can slash health-care costs 75% with 2 fundamental changes — and without ‘Medicare for All’  By Sean Masaki Flynn, MarketWatch, Nov. 9, 2019 [Focus on Singapore]
• Putting Profits Ahead of Patients By Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, The New York Review of Books, July 13, 2017. [Health care in the US is enormously costly, often in ways that are baffling not only to patients but to doctors themselves.] 
• Health: The Right Diagnosis and the Wrong Treatment By Marcia Angell, The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015. [Review of 'America’s Bitter Pill’ by Steven Brill.]
• On Breaking One’s Neck By Arnold Relman, The New York Review of Books, February 6, 2014. [A doctor’s near-death experience and what it reveals about the US medical care system.]
• Data
• Financing Healthcare By Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, Our World in Data, June 16, 2017
  
• NHANES R Package CRAN,  
• NHANES CDC
• Download NHANES data using R Ehsan Karim
• Analytic data creation using NHANES using R Ehsan Karim
• Introduction to R for health data analysis Ehsan Karim
• Complex survey data analysis course with causal inference methods Ehsan Karim (NHANES examples)
• Deep dive into health survey data analysis for R using DHS and NHANES By Kyle Monahan, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Sep 27, 2023
• NHANES Introduction By Sri Banerjee, YouTube, Feb 12, 2022
• How to use NHANES for diet sustainability analyses By Zach Conrad, YouTube, Sep 27, 2023