Links: Problems with American Health Care, Job Loss and Unhealthy Behaviors

1. A really interesting piece in the NYT about inefficiency in American health care. The piece, by David Leonhardt, uses prostate cancer as a lens to highlight the gaps between clinical practice and the existing research evidence (or lack thereof). Pretty eye opening stuff.

2. More on American health care: a great piece from The Economist about the challenges awaiting health care reform.

3. My colleagues at Yale, Padmaja Ayyagari, Bill Gallo, Jason Fletcher and Jody Sindelar, along with Partha Deb from CUNY Hunter, have an interesting new paper looking at how job loss influences subsequent unhealthy behaviors. Aside from the interesting research question, this paper is pretty interesting from a methodological standpoint in that they use plausibly (more) exogenous in job loss by exploiting information on business closings as well as employ finite mixture models to model the underlying heterogeneity in effects and people's propensity for unhealthy behaviors. The latter technique is becoming quite hot in health economics now as there is increasing interest in trying to understand how individuals may differ in their underlying propensities towards different behaviors and disease.