Michael E. Chernew

TL;DR: The authors determined the value of a QALY as implied by the value-of-life literature and compared this value with arbitrary thresholds for cost-effectiveness that have come into common use and far exceed the "rules of thumb" that are frequently used to determine whether an intervention produces an acceptable increase in health benefits in exchange for incremental expenditures.

TL;DR: The quantity and associated economic cost of informal caregiving for the elderly with dementia are substantial and increase sharply as cognitive impairment worsens, which represents a national annual cost of more than $18 billion.

TL;DR: Services detected by a limited number of measures of low-value care constituted modest proportions of overall spending but affected substantial proportions of beneficiaries and may be reflective of overuse more broadly.

TL;DR: The use of propensity scores in conjunction with DD models are described, in particular investigating a propensity score weighting strategy that weights the four groups to be balanced on a set of characteristics to deal with confounding.