This is different

Focusing on value: this time is different.

Over the last 30 years, rounds of therapeutic treatments with cost consciousness and cost containment have been administered to the healthcare industry, with generally disappointing clinical response. The last treatment cycle came in the 1990s, with the combination therapy of prospective payment and managed care, treatments that produced a transient remission in cost inflation but that left the...

Is This Time Different? The Slowdown in Health Care Spending.

Why have health care costs moderated in the last decade? Some have suggested that the Great Recession alone was the cause, but health expenditure growth in the depths of the recession was nearly identical to growth prior to the recession. Nor can the Affordable Care Act (ACA) take credit, since the slowdown began prior to its implementation. Instead, we identify three primary causes of the slow...

This Time Is Different: Financial Integration and the 2007 Crisis

We study how the 2007-2009 crisis has changed the impact of financial integration on the transmission of international business cycles, focusing on a sample of 20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009. We use a differences-in-differences strategy for identification and investigate the effect of bilateral financial linkages on the co-movement of output, investment, and consumption before and...

This is dedicated to our former chairman Dr. Mahmoud Rohani

Is this reaction caused by this drug?

The case report on cotrimoxazole-induced pancreatitis by Versleijen et al. deals with the assessment of the probability that cotrimoxazole induced the acute pancreatitis: a causality assessment. In this editorial, we comment on this assessment from a clinical, pharmacological and epidemiological perspective. Moreover, the consequences of the results of the assessment are discussed.