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The Healthcare Plan Most People Should Buy -- and Why They Don't
Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2023
"The decision, which has enormous implications for our health and finances, is horrendously complex. And we are universally terrible at it."
Can Amazon remake health care?
Harvard Gazette, August 10, 2022
“Amazon is good at selling other people’s products — but I don’t see it as a pharmaceutical company that might cure disease.”
You will probably get Omicron. It's time to adjust expectations about what beating COVID means
Fortune Magazine, January 12, 2022
“If a lot of people are getting COVID despite being very careful, then I think the stigma of getting COVID-19 will fall substantially,” Chandra said. “The politics of the disease has changed.”
Omicron testing shortages and delays are making results useless—and deepening COVID inequality
Fortune Magazine, January 10, 2022
“The problem right now is: If you get sick, you don’t have a paycheck. Trying to avoid getting sick, you don’t have a test that helps you avoid getting sick,” Amitabh Chandra, professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, tells Fortune.
How to Cope with Medicare's Rising Costs
New York Times, December 22, 2021
“People are dropping drugs that keep them away from death and out of hospital,” said Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a co-author of the study.
When the Price isn't Right
Politico, September 29, 2021
It turns out, Harvard economist Amitabh Chandra says, that patients don’t really like to shop around after all. In research Chandra helped conduct on price transparency results, patients barely used the products — and often decided on higher-priced medical services.
'I Hate That Question': 7 experts try to answer who has the world's best health-care system
Washington Post, June 17, 2021
A Rare Find in Health Care: A Solution to Racial Inequity
HBS Working Knowledge, June 2, 2021
For the past 20 years, Chandra has been examining differences in health outcomes between white and Black Americans, searching for solutions to shrink the gap. In a recent working paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research, he proposes one such solution: helping Black patients choose better-performing hospitals.
What Will it Take to Pandemic-Proof America?
The New Yorker, April 15, 2021
It’s important, Chandra argues, for the government to consistently fund the creation of vaccines and other treatments, even if they end up not being used. “When it comes to something like vaccines, you don’t want the best deal,” he said. “You don’t want to pay the minimum price. You want to overpay and attract the attention of many companies simultaneously.”
Charging patients just $10 more for medications leads to more deaths
Vox, February 10, 2021
“We find that small increases in cost cause patients to cut back on drugs with large benefits, ultimately causing their death,” the authors — Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack, and Ziad Obermeyer — wrote."
Study: More evidence health care cost-sharing doesn't work
Axios, February 9, 2021
Even a seemingly modest increase in out-of-pocket costs will cause many patients to stop taking drugs they need, according to a new working paper from Harvard economist Amitabh Chandra.
Can America Improve its Health Care System?
American Enterprise Institute's Political Economy Podcast, December 9, 2020
"Health care policy is difficult, featuring intractable trade-offs that make it nearly impossible to satisfy everyone. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that one of our two political parties has increasingly flirted with the utopian proposal of Medicare for All, with little understanding of how to enact it or what the unintended consequences might be. And the other party seems determined to avoid the topic of health care reform, at least publicly. But the state of our health care system matters — it’s an increasingly large part of our economy, and it is the source of crucial innovations. So I’m delighted to discuss it with Amitabh Chandra."
The Pandemic Is Showing Us How Capitalism Is Amazing, and Inadequate
New York Times, November 14, 2020
“No pharmaceutical company would have the incentive to do the basic scientific discovery, because it’s not patentable,” said Amitabh Chandra, a health economist at Harvard. “A lot of basic science is not profitable. It’s just knowledge. At some point basic science becomes useful, and then the private sector can come in. But who’s going to unlock the fact that there is a 3-D printer in the cell called a ribosome, or a naturally occurring messenger RNA that is read by the ribosome to produce another protein?” he said, describing the mechanism by which the Pfizer vaccine works.
Despite the pandemic, some jobs in health care have declined
Marketplace Morning Report, October 8, 2020
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that the health care industry gained more than 100,000 jobs in September. But the sector is still down about 800,000 jobs from this time last year, according to Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard University.
After saving his own life with a repurposed drug, a professor reviews every drug being tried against Covid-19. Here's what he's found
CNN, June 28, 2020
“Covid-19 illustrates a market failure in how we build vaccines,” said Amitabh Chandra, a health economist with joint appointments as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. “We haven’t given firms the correct incentives to make vaccines before a pandemic. Vaccines are very hard to test before the pandemic hits.”
Post-COVID Health Care: More Screens, Less Red Tape?
HBS Working Knowledge, May 22, 2020
Quoted: Amitabh Chandra
"Recessions and pandemics create job losses that highlight the problems of tying health insurance to employment. Cleaving insurance from employment is often viewed as a path to more government control of health care, but this does not have to be true if employees can purchase private insurance on exchanges. I believe that we will start to see more demand for this kind of policy in the coming months."
Medicare-for-all would be a boon to the American labor market, study finds
Washington Post, March 5, 2020
“Treating the health care system like a (wildly inefficient) jobs program conflicts directly with the goal of ensuring that all Americans have access to care at an affordable price,” economists Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra wrote in a 2012 New England Journal of Medicine column."
SDOH Spenders Spawn SDOH Vendors
Managed Care, January 27, 2020
Just because health is influenced by social factors doesn’t mean that health care institutions have the expertise to fix them, says Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard health care economist.
We need a national conversation about our health care priorities
Op-Ed, Boston Globe, December 23, 2019, Authors: Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra
If you ask different people to identify the main problem with our health care system, you’re likely to get answers ranging from lack of insurance coverage to prices that are too high, to lack of access to providers, to surprise billing, to waste, to lack of attention, to issues of prevention and wellness. Solving any of these problems, let alone all of them, requires targeting our health care resources in a way that balances competing priorities and focuses health care spending on the care that will actually produce the greatest health benefits. How we pay for health care — as patients, insurers, government programs — is the key.
Biosimilar competition is here to stay
Life Science Leader, November 27, 2019
Quoted: Amitabh Chandra
To get biosimilar competition to work, we will need regulations that remove market blockages. These measures can range from preferential use of biosimilars in Medicare and Medicaid, all the way to compulsory licensing when exclusivity periods expire.
Health care is getting more and more expensive, and low-wage workers are bearing more of the cost
Vox, September 30, 2019
... a 2006 study from Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, both with the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that an overall 10 percent increase in health insurance premiums reduced wages by 2.3 percent and actually reduced the probability of becoming employed by 1.2 percent.
Throwing in the Towel on Biosimilars Wouldn't Be Easy, Expert Says
The Center for Biosimilars, September 5, 2019
Amitabh Chandra, PhD, Ethel Zimmerman Wiener professor of public policy and director of health policy research at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, says that while price regulation is not impossible, “It’s very, very hard to do. Given that it’s hard to do, do we need to do it?”
Dealing with the shortage of rural physicians
Medical Economics, August 29, 2019
...the very factors that tend to make rural patients sicker are also those that make it difficult to recruit and retain healthcare providers for those areas, says Amitabh Chandra, director of health policy research at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Democratic hopefuls take aim at insurer and pharma profits
ABCNews, August 12, 2019
Harvard University health care economist Amitabh Chandra said focusing on the profitability of major drugmakers misses a crucial part of the drug industry's story. Many companies engaged in research and drug development don't make money and are instead kept afloat by investors hoping for discoveries that will lead to big returns.
Who Will Be Our Moral Conscience Now? A Tribute to Uwe Reinhardt
Health Affairs Blog, August 8, 2019
Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University said the importance of health care coverage will only grow over time as new technologies expand the frontiers of what can be done to treat or cure diseases.
Also mentioned: Austin Frakt, Zack Cooper, Katherine Baicker
Why Doctors Are Drowning in Medical School Debt
Scientific American, July 15, 2019
Chandra explains that, “in any industry—and medicine is no different—the price of the service depends on the cost of producing the service.” “But!” Chandra emphasizes, “But it also reflects the willingness to pay for that service.”