The Unbroken Window

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

There are two aspects of our future health care needs that individuals need to consider. First, individuals want to protect themselves from the financial devastation that an unexpected and expensive medical condition might cause in their lives. When someone contracts a disease, perhaps a form of cancer, it can seriously reduce someone’s ability to work [...]

Read Full Post »

A little over a hundred years ago a considerable number of the mutual aid societies began to offer medical care to their members. The way they did this was to hire a doctor on salary, and he would then provide basic medical services to all of the members of the order. As David Beito tells [...]

Read Full Post »

The Medicare Administrator tells us how wonderful Obamacare is going to be for the lowering of costs of practicing medicine: The Partnership for Patients is investing up to $1 billion to help health-care professionals learn about and implement proven methods for improving patient safety. Reducing medical injuries and complications for patients will save lives and [...]

Read Full Post »