The Unbroken Window

A reminder of how things are going up North:
The system is beset by problems. According to the Canadian Medical Association, roughly 4 million to 5 million people don’t have a family physician.Patients wait for practically any problem, sometimes with disastrous results. A Montreal woman died recently after waiting four days in a hospital ER, the [...]

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OK, I lied about taking a complete hiatus. Here is a new research paper on how competition between hospitals in England impacts health outcomes (and do note that the starting point here is that there was no/little competition before the reform).
The effect of competition on the quality of health care remains a contested issue.  Most [...]

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I found myself reading the Old Testament the other day. Here is a quote which moved me to post (it is Samuel warning the Israelites about wanting a King to rule them):
And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them [...]

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David Cutler asks this excellent question. His answer:
I identify two factors as being particularly important in organizational stagnation: public insurance programs that are oriented to volume of care and not value, and inadequate information about quality of care. Recent reforms have aspects that bear on these problems.
Not once in the 43 pages of the paper [...]

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See here.
But it looks to me like the Senate is pushing for a system in which hospitals that set prices and contain costs successfully enough to find solid financial footing subsidize those that don’t.
So your health care expenses outpace GDP growth by 8% after your super cool health care for everyone reform.You still have not [...]

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Would you prefer a world where we “waste” 10% of our expenditures on administrative costs, or one where we only “waste” 5%? Of course you cannot answer that question without knowing how much we spend. If you get the same product in each case, but total spending in the first is $100 and total spending [...]

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From today’s news:
On Thursday, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick’s insurance regulators announced that they had rejected 235 of 274 insurer requests for premium increases for individuals and small businesses over the coming year. This power has been on the books since 1977 but never used, and Mr. Patrick announced in February that he was dusting it [...]

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In my former home state of the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, now over 50% of internists and 40% of family/general practitioners are not accepting new patients. And of course, Nurse Practitioners and Physicians Assistants are not permitted to open their own practices, nor are retail clinics exactly encouraged.
You know how I plan to get care [...]

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It is well known that the “US” spends more on health care than any other country on earth. This is true in per capita terms and it is true as an overall share of GDP.
According to the OECD, the U.S. spends 5% of GDP more on health than France, the nation with the second highest [...]

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It will be any day before the goons show up to my door to shut me up. Here is one justification the Commander in Speech gave us all about getting his bill passed:

Both the House and Senate versions of health insurance reform rest upon the following building blocks:

Affordable health options, with subsidies for working [...]

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