Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
“We are not cutting Medicare benefits. We are trying to eliminate waste.” Vice President Joe Biden, 25 February 2010. “Our country’s too big, too complicated, too decentralized for Washington, a few of us here, just to write a few rules about remaking seventeen percent of the economy all at once.” Senator Lamar Alexander, 25 February 2010.…
How did Obama’s Healthcare Summit go? It was basically a pile of bad ideas. Senator Harkin gave the best explanation of what’s truly needed, but I’ll save that for last. Examples of BAD IDEAS include Starting over. John McCain asked to “Go back to the beginning” and Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said “If we can start…
Irreversibility occurs when treatment in the current period alters the efficacy of treatments in the future. A paper by Zivin and Neidell (2010) give the following simple example: Examine the following table. In the first scenario, the individual has disease X in two periods. If he takes treatment 1 (T1) then he will recover 6…
David Williams of the Health Business Blog hosts the latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk. Some of the highlights include: Having sex can boost your immune system Is bullying health insurers the best way to restrain rate increases? How much health insurance do you want? The government may not know unless it keeps at…
Medicare’s ‘Strike Force‘ If a state lowers its drinking age, it increases traffic accidents for residents of other states? Modeling count data in SAS. McAllen, TX As Outlier? Why Not Houston? C.F.T.G.F.I.H.F.M.C-E.F.G.H.T.T.R.A.P.
Before a drug can come to market, it must receive FDA approval. This involves 3 phases of testing with Phase I having 20-80 volunteers and Phase III often testing more than 1,000 people. Despite the FDA approval, patients can sue drug companies if they are injured by a drug. Patients can generally sue manufacturers under…
“Gross misperception, especially in the minds of noneconomists, often prompts the claim that ‘the market’ (or ‘capitalism’) either works or does not work without constraints, a claim that is demonstrably unsupportable, either in analytical logic or in empirical reality.” James M. Buchanan, Nobel prize winning economist
Health reform is only good when its your idea. San Francisco restaurant’s institute a “Health Surcharge”. Massachusetts’ health reform makes the state less attractive to younger workers. HHS releases over $0.8 billion in grants for HIT. Do we need Federal Antitrust Law for health insurance?
The book The Boids and the Bees by A.H. Jones and Jerry Bozeman can be summarized in one acronym: CASY. This stands for Complex Adaptive Systems. The point of the book is that CASYs are more complex than we think and that most of life is make up of CASYs. Let us take the example…
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Medicaid First Aid.