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Aaron Schwartz

@aschwartz.bsky.social
3.3K followers 671 following 836 posts

MD-PhD professing at the University of Pennsylvania. Health, economics, and health economics.

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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 2h
I appreciate you posting these setbacks.
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NBER @nber.org · 13h
More physicians and higher physician quality, measured by licensing exam scores, reduce patient mortality in Chilean public hospitals, from Juan Pablo Atal, Tomás Larroucau, Pablo Muñoz, and Cristóbal Otero www.nber.org/papers/w35855
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NBER @nber.org · 08/10/2026
Denmark quasi-randomly assigned 12,000+ refugee children across towns. Those placed where social mobility is higher earned more as adults and had fewer convictions and teen births, from Daysal, Doyle Jr., Samandari, Simonsen, and Trandafir www.nber.org/papers/w35853
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Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
clawed frog embryo case update!!
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Bex is WEAK on crime @bextraordinary.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Watching people in salaried, benefitted jobs try to figure out alternative health insurance options because even their employer-subsidized plans are now too expensive... feels real bad, man. Things are bad.
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STAT @statnews.com · 08/10/2026
U.S. health spending is on pace to cost almost $16,500 per person this year. And the biggest portion of an employer’s health spending — even for the largest corporations in the country — has remained the same since the 1980s: bit.ly/4edjsFi
Bar chart illustrating the increase in average per-person healthcare spending from 2021 to 2026. Categories include hospital outpatient, physician care, prescription drugs, hospital inpatient, and other. The total rises from $6,107 in 2021 to $8,460 in 2026. Chart by J. Emory Parker/STAT, source Milliman.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
A clear blue sky morning here in the keystone state.
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Finally a proper working paper for this study that produced one of the most astounding figures I've ever seen. Basically economics is different from every other field, empirically. This paper looks at the concentration of university affiliations for award winners. www.nber.org/papers/w35875
Figure 2 from the paper: institutional concentration of university affiliation at time of award correlated with institutional concentration of phd granting university. Economics is the most concentrated of any field. 
Figure 2 from the paper: institutional concentration of university affiliation at time of award correlated with institutional concentration of lifetime employment. Economics is the most concentrated of any field.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Welch on the Grail multicancer screen www.statnews.com/2026/10/06/g...
statnews.com
Why the FDA should not approve an ineffective multicancer screening test
“Telling more people they have cancer is not progress; progress is having fewer people die from cancer,” H. Gilbert Welch writes of Grail’s multicancer screening test.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Handy methods win Nobel. ✋
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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 07/10/2026
i'm actually going to take this goofy post somewhat seriously: much as going to the gym requires discipline, so too does going to the mental gym require discipline. and discipline is harder than it looks: it is about *your* ability to discipline *yourself*
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Olivier Simard-Casanova @o.simardcasanova.net · 03/10/2026
The US is, or was, the world’s leading scientific power in economics. The Trump administration is inflicting extraordinary damage on what was once an infrastructure of excellence. The open question is how much of that damage will prove permanent.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Sorry I was wrong, the paper doesn’t have results from thousands of regressions. It’s actually tens of thousands when you count the appendix.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
1.5 year old has new habit. Whenever we put clothes on her, she declares “I cute!” Thinking of adopting this habit myself.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I'm very grateful to see this excellent commentary by Meredith Rosenthal accompanying the paper. A great summary of the key issues. 2/2 jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
jamanetwork.com
Recalibrating the Medicare Fee Schedule Using Capitated Care
Although much attention has been paid to the strengths, weaknesses, and scalability of value-based payment schemes (eg, accountable care organizations and bundled payment), most policy experts recogni...
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Our new paper on the physician fee schedule took more person-hours of research work than any other journal publication I've worked on. The study summarizes thousands of regressions we ran to provide some empirical and conceptual tools for fee schedule reforms. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... 1/2
jamanetwork.com
Service-Level Utilization in Risk-Based Contracts and a Benchmarking Approach for Fee-Schedule Reforms
This cross-sectional study compares service-level utilization patterns between health care professional organizations in full-risk contracts and those in a traditional fee-for-service payment structur...
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Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
And so it continues... Our economic debates seem utterly disconnected from the reality. That reality: This is an economy mostly creating healthcare jobs, and it does so month after month, and everything else is just noise.
Line chart titled "Effectively all of the net job creation has been in healthcare and social assistance, and jobs are shrinking in the rest of the economy" showing change in non-farm payrolls since January 2025 through September 2026. Healthcare and social assistance added 998,000 jobs with consistent growth throughout the period, while the rest of the economy lost 222,000 jobs, meaning all net job creation came from healthcare. The rest of the economy showed particular weakness from May through August 2025 when losses reached 218,000 jobs. This striking divergence reveals an unusual concentration where one sector's growth of roughly 48,000 jobs per month has offset persistent contraction across all other industries combined.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Wow quite a story
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Dr Hannah M. Rowland @hannahmrowland.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Hope your day was better than Darwin’s, on this day 165 years ago
I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody &everything.

Charles Darwin
Letter to Charles Lyell
1st October 1861
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The Wall Street Journal @wsj.com · 30/09/2026
Hedge-fund titan Ken Griffin is donating $2 billion to start a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami, part of the largest-ever individual gift toward higher education.
on.wsj.com
Exclusive | Ken Griffin Is Making the Largest Donation to Higher Education in U.S. History
The Citadel CEO’s gift will launch a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Several of my classmates in medical school were graduates of military academies like West Point, where they took classes in organic chemistry just like the rest of us. Does it really help the military to hobble these schools’ ability to recruit top orgo professors?
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Impressive figures here
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
You lucked out it was during that eagles game
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Julian Reif @julianreif.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It's starting www.nber.org/system/files...
nber.org
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Where is Wipeout? Find me a better tv show about people falling down. You can’t.
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Emily Moin @emilymoin.com · 25/09/2026
Gift link, and some reactions herein. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Being a Doctor Will Never Be the Same After A.I. (Gift Article)
I’m confident in my mastery over what doctors do — and less confident about my continued mastery of an ever-evolving universe of facts.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
static.klipy.com
Grim Fandango Manny Calavera
ALT: Grim Fandango Manny Calavera
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Happy 100th to John Coltrane. If you want to merge your consciousness with the universe, put on A Love Supreme. m.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3C...
m.youtube.com
John Coltrane - A Love Supreme [Full Album] (1965)
YouTube video by Jazzaddict 98
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
My kid’s elementary school teaches all the kids to ride a bike and ride safely on roads and it is just the best.
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NEJM.org @nejm.org · 22/09/2026
In a trial of a blood-based multicancer early-detection test added to usual care, the incidence of stage III or IV cancer after three rounds of screening did not differ significantly from that with usual care alone. Full NHS-Galleri trial results: nej.md/4xRZN5L
A bar chart from an Original Article published in the New England Journal of Medicine article titled "Effect of Screening with Multicancer Early-Detection Test on Late-Stage Cancer Diagnosis." The chart shows the distribution of the route to cancer diagnosis according to trial group after three annual screening rounds. The trial name, NHS-Galleri, is in parentheses after the title. The NEJM identity sits at the bottom.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Article is useful in that it shows that a) Trump is directly involved in these decisions, b) sees them in purely personalist terms - he wants to politicize research grants so he can destroy Harvard for daring to defy him
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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
A paper is finished when the embarrassment of submitting it becomes smaller than the embarrassment of still working on it
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Definitely an “and/or” situation
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
There are only three ways to interpret a rejection and none of them are fun: “The referee’s dumb,” “The editor’s dumb,” or “I’m dumb”.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Wow a health economist on USPSTF, Steve Parente. Not sure if that’s ever happened before. www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/about...
uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
Our Members | United States Preventive Services Taskforce
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I would prefer an exclamatory question, i.e. “Who the f*** was James Fenimore Cooper??!!”
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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
There’s a lot of doom & gloom around how AI is affecting higher education. To a certain extent, I get it. AI is making some things harder. But I’ve found that AI has in some ways greatly enhanced my teaching. For one, it’s opened up applied activities that weren’t possible before. One example: 🧵
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
static.klipy.com
Kevin Malone: Me Think Why Waste Time
ALT: Kevin Malone: Me Think Why Waste Time
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
To those of you who aren’t plugged into econ news, this is a new book by some top economists. They linked business and personal tax data to understand the sources of wealth for rich Americans. Surprising results followed.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Excited that my copy arrived.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I tell my patients, "there is no evidence that fish oil will help you but I am certain it's bad for your wallet and for the fish"
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Michael L. Barnett @mlbarnett.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
yikes "More than two months after WISeR’s launch, a Medicare administration contractor, Noridian, realized that one of the vendors did not know the difference between Medicare Part A and Part B." www.statnews.com/2026/09/15/m...
statnews.com
Medicare's AI prior authorization pilot was rushed and full of problems, new documents reveal
The rushed launch of a Medicare pilot to use AI for prior authorization led to delayed care in some instances, new documents reveal.
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Nicholas Bagley @nbagley.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
After years of thinking and writing about why American governance is so clunky and slow, I wrote a book about how our well-intentioned laws have lots of unintended consequences. Why We Can’t Have Nice Things comes out Dec. 1 from Norton. Pre-order now! www.nicholasbagley.com
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Another big number for the False Claims Act. www.justice.gov/opa/pr/villa...
justice.gov
The Villages Health System LLC Agrees to $541.5M Settlement to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations
The Villages Health System LLC (TVH), a healthcare provider group headquartered in The Villages, Florida, has agreed to a $541.5 million settlement to resolve self-disclosed allegations that it violat...
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This unwinding of the market with earlier and earlier offers is what prompted the creation of the match program for medical residency.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Not today, human extinction
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
If a process that undirected could produce an organism so dangerous, just imagine what scary things a self-directed process could produce.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Snake venom is really scary. Yet, the evolutionary process that produced it was extremely slow. Successful mutations were vastly outnumbered by problematic ones, and sorting out progress from setbacks required waiting to see whether reproduction was boosted or hindered.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Think about how killer viruses, bacteria, and animals developed their deadly traits-- evolution by random genetic mutation and natural selection, sometimes over billions of years. It's frightening to consider an entity that can edit its own code quickly, at a massive scale, toward its own goals.
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Aaron Schwartz @aschwartz.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
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