Wisconsin Street Cred
“My veins run with cheese, bratwurst, and a little Spotted Cow and some Millers. I even think ice fishing is interesting.” Paul Ryan, August 12th.
Month: September 2012
Quotations of the Day: On Realistic Expectations
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. — Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The Effect of Hospital Consolidation on Prices and Quality
An interesting report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation summarizes the literature describing the effect of hospital concentration in a market on prices and quality. The general consensus from the literature is the following: Increases in hospital market concentration lead to increases in the price of hospital care Hospital mergers in concentrated markets generally lead…
CoR
The 166th edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Term Life Insurance by Jeff.
Mid-week Links
Face-off: Bundled Episodes vs. Global Payments. Recipe for writing a hit popular brain book. A mandate without teeth. Writing huts. Are hospitals less safe then we think?
Should all individuals be screened for Hepatitis C?
The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is largely curable: “In clinical trials, antiviral therapy with pegylated interferon and ribavirin (PEG-IFNR) has resulted in a sustained viral response (SVR) (that is, cure) of HCV infection in 46% of patients infected with genotype 1 (which infects 70% and 90% of chronically infected white and African American persons in…
Is Ireland a Single Payer System?
Yes and no. All persons resident in Ireland are entitled to receive health care through the public health care system, which is managed by the Health Service Executive and funded by general taxation. Like Medicare in the U.S., the public health system requires coinsurance payments for certain types of care. Poor individuals (or those on…
Weekend Links
Big data for your blood. Being or doing. Are cost and quality correlated? Mystery kidney disease. The folly of bank regulation. Can ACOs reduce the cost of dual-eligibles?
It is easy to be great
“The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after…
Whooping Cough Outbreak in Texas
The Houston Chronicle reports confirming six deaths and 1,153 cases as of Aug. 31 in Texas from pertussis, commonly known as the whooping cough. Texas’ death toll accounts for nearly half of the deaths from the disease nationwide so far this year. Whooping Cough had previously been eradicated from the U.S. Why is this outbreak…