The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Health Care on Nov 26th, 2011
Did you know that food expenditures for an average family in the US are lower today (as a share of income) than at any point in American history? Did you know that clothing and exercise equipment costs are lower today than they have been in the last three decades? Did you know that the (marginal) [...]
Posted in Health Care on Oct 31st, 2011
Megan McArdle points us to the following chart: Let me ask, which is more dangerous – not having a sufficient density of the population vaccinated against infectious diseases that were responsible for life expectancy being below 50 just 100 years ago, or people drinking coffee? When we have nationalized medicine will such situations be allowed [...]
Posted in Health Care, Welfare State, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Oct 31st, 2011
John Goodman with a typically astute observation on the double standard that applies to health policy: Arizona…plans to limit adult Medicaid recipients to 25 days of hospital coverage a year, starting as soon as the end of October. Hawaii plans to cut Medicaid coverage to 10 days a year in April. Other states have already [...]
Posted in Health Care, Regulation on Oct 2nd, 2011
From tomorrow’s WSJ: When people age, the main valve carrying blood out of the heart becomes brittle. As this aortic valve narrows, it can cause debilitating heart failure, and even death. Fixing the problem in the United States requires open-heart surgery. In Europe, the problem can be repaired using a tiny catheter that introduces a [...]
Posted in Health Care on Aug 3rd, 2011
Several incidents, and one recent one in particular, that my family has had with doctors and the insurance industry pretty much capture why the health care system is screwed and has no hope of being improved any time soon by any simple fix. Allow me to illustrate with a tale involving “preventive medicine.” After our [...]
Posted in Health Care, Taxation on Jun 25th, 2011
I just dug up a paper written by a colleague of mine before I arrived at U of R. Here is an excerpt from the abstract: This study assesses the consequences of altering the favorable tax treatment of health insurance, and addresses the question of why it seems so politically difficult to accomplish this type [...]
Posted in Health Care, Market Failures, Regulation, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Jun 22nd, 2011
One of the few things I am actually an alarmist about is biological pandemics. Given the past 50 years of US history I have no reason to be this way, but as this Megan McArdle post illustrates, there has been a really disturbing trend happening in medicine over the last 30 years: The first shows [...]
Posted in Health Care on Jun 21st, 2011
I was watching a debate the other night on health care. It was pretty clear from the satisfaction in the delivery from the person supporting the position that “health care is a right” (let’s not blog that for now) that his most salient point (for his argument contained very little of substance outside of the [...]
Posted in Government Gone Wild, Health Care on Jun 3rd, 2011
In this week’s edition of “Health Care is Not About Health Care,” Megan McArdle describes another surprising ObamaCare outcome: (ObamaCare’s high risk pools) signed up just 18,000 people as of March … It was estimated by Medicare’s Chief Actuary that around 400,000 would sign up … What are the requirements for getting into those high [...]
Posted in Health Care on May 31st, 2011
In a fun discussion with a well-read and bright older woman at a picnic yesterday: Woman: People with pre-existing medical conditions will never get health insurance under Ryan’s reforms Me: People with pre-existing medical conditions should not be insurable (note that is nuance to this point, but that is for another blog post) Woman: But [...]
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