Trading Places. Do Doctors Make Better Patients? MIT Economist, Jonathan Gruber, PhD.

Name: Jonathan Gruber, PhD

Location: Cambridge, MA. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Specialty: Economist. Public Policy Advisor.

All right welcome back. If you could pick the ideal patient population, armed with the best knowledge, fluent in medical jargon, generally healthy and willing to comply with recommended treatments, who would you pick? How about doctors? Doctors may not be perfect patients but at least they should outperform similar non-clinicians, right?

Surprisingly, little to no research has actually been done comparing the care, compliance and outcomes of doctors to comparable groups of non- physicians. For reasons we’ll soon see, this is actually a difficult question to tackle, but it’s a very important question with broader implications.

Today’s guest is MIT economist, Jonathan Gruber. He recently co-authored a study using a unique data source to examine just how good doctors and their family members are when they find themselves in the patient seat. Spoiler alert, obviously if the results aren’t surprising, we probably would not be here talking about it.

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