Health care expenditure and income in Canada: Evidence from panel data.

This paper investigates the long-run relationship between health care expenditures (HCE) and income using Canadian provincial data spanning a period of 40 years from 1981 to 2020. We study the non-stationary and cointegration properties of HCE and income and estimate the long-run income elasticities of HCE. Using heterogeneous panel models that incorporate cross-section dependence via unobserved common correlated factors to capture global shocks, we estimate long-run income elasticities that lie in the 0.11-0.16 range. Our results indicate that health care is a necessity good for Canada. These elasticity estimates are much smaller than those estimated in other studies for Canada. We find that HCE and income in Canada are cointegrated and that short-run changes in federal transfers significantly and positively affect HCE.

Medication abortion: State of information on Student Health Center websites.

Objective: To document the information on medication abortion on university Student Health Center (SHC) websites. Study Sample: Four-year bachelors granting public universities' Student Health Center websites. Methods: We conduct thematic content analysis for medication abortion-related information on 547 SHC websites in the United States as of August 2022 using computer-assisted software. We validate the software with human annotation. Results: Medication abortion is mentioned on 23 (4%) university SHC websites, and in 13 (57%) of these websites, it is only mentioned to exclude it from definitions of emergency contraception. Only two websites, 6% of the California public schools included in the sample, advertise medication abortion services through their SHC websites. One hundred fifteen (21%) university websites provide links to Planned Parenthood that gives information on how to navigate abortion access across all 50 states. Conclusion: There is inadequate information on SHC websites regarding medication abortion services and how to access them.

Quantifying the Quality of Web-Based Health Information on Student Health Center Websites Using a Software Tool: Design and Development Study.

BACKGROUND: The internet has become a major source of health information, especially for adolescents and young adults. Unfortunately, inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated health information is widespread on the web. Often adolescents and young adults turn to authoritative websites such as the student health center (SHC) website of the university they attend to obtain reliable health information. Although most on-campus SHC clinics comply with the American College Health Association standards, their websites are not subject to any standards or code of conduct. In the absence of quality standards or guidelines, monitoring and compliance processes do not exist for SHC websites. Thus, there is no oversight of the health information published on SHC websites by any central governing body. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to develop, describe, and validate an open-source software that can effectively and efficiently assess the quality of health information on SHC websites in the United States. METHODS: Our cross-functional team designed and developed an open-source software, QMOHI (Quantitative Measures of Online Health Information), that assesses information quality for a specified health topic from all SHC websites belonging to a predetermined list of universities. The tool was designed to compute 8 different quality metrics that quantify various aspects of information quality based on the retrieved text. We conducted and reported results from 3 experiments that assessed the QMOHI tool in terms of its scalability, generalizability in health topics, and robustness to changes in universities' website structure. RESULTS: Empirical evaluation has shown the QMOHI tool to be highly scalable and substantially more efficient than manually assessing web-based information quality. The tool's runtime was dominated by network-related tasks (98%), whereas the metric computations take <2 seconds. QMOHI demonstrated topical versatility, evaluating SHC website information quality for four disparate and broad health topics (COVID, cancer, long-acting reversible contraceptives, and condoms) and two narrowly focused topics (hormonal intrauterine device and copper intrauterine device). The tool exhibited robustness, correctly measuring information quality despite changes in SHC website structure. QMOHI can support longitudinal studies by being robust to such website changes. CONCLUSIONS: QMOHI allows public health researchers and practitioners to conduct large-scale studies of SHC websites that were previously too time- and cost-intensive. The capability to generalize broadly or focus narrowly allows a wide range of applications of QMOHI, allowing researchers to study both mainstream and underexplored health topics. QMOHI's ability to robustly analyze SHC websites periodically promotes longitudinal investigations and allows QMOHI to be used as a monitoring tool. QMOHI serves as a launching pad for our future work that aims to develop a broadly applicable public health tool for web-based health information studies with potential applications far beyond SHC websites.

Contraception information on the websites of student health centers in the United States.

OBJECTIVE: As University Student Health Centers are considered reputable sources of information by many young adults, we evaluate the presence of contraceptive information on their websites. STUDY DESIGN: We used a software tool (Quantitative Measures of Online Health Information), designed for public health research to examine online information access on four broad categories of contraception and reproductive health (LARC/injectables, Contraception, Condom, Pap test) on student health center websites from all (591) public four-year universities across the United States between July to September 2020. Using a logistic regression model, we documented factors that are associated with information disparities. RESULTS: Our sample consisted of 545 public universities after excluding those for which information was unavailable. In 357 (66%) of the universities in our sample, we found evidence of some information related to contraception. A one percentage point increase in the student population that are Pell grant recipients, an indicator of the proportion of low-income students enrolled, is associated with a 3% to 6% (0.01

Racial differences in Transitions to Marriage for Unmarried Mothers.

Unlike prior studies that have explained racial differences in the transitions to marriage among unmarried women, our study used the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine racial differences in the transitions to marriage among unmarried women following a non-marital birth. We found that Black mothers were 60-65% more likely to delay marriage after a non-marital birth compared to White mothers and these racial gaps were only partially explained by economic, demographic and attitudinal factors. Our paper further contributes to this literature by examining changes in cohabitation patterns, educational attainment, poverty status and attitudes of gender distrust that are able to partially explain and reduce these racial gaps in transitions to marriage. With the general decline in marriage and rise in cohabitation, our paper tried to assess whether cohabitation is a leading factor for marriage or a substitute for marriage for unmarried mothers. Racial disparities have important implications for child wellbeing and intergenerational transmission of inequalities.