Can hearing aids slow dementia?

People with hearing loss are about twice as likely as others to develop dementia. The wider availability and use of hearing aids would probably be the single intervention most effective in reducing the incidence of dementia The Economist: “How to reduce the risk of developing dementia“ The Economist argues that a healthy lifestyle can prevent…

Medical bill shock and imperfect moral hazard

One of the goals of cost sharing (e.g., copayments, deductibles) is to decrease moral hazard. In other words, if a good is free (or lower cost), you’ll consume more of it than if you had to pay for all of it out-of-pocket. One challenge in health care ours that prices are not transparent. How much…

Are drug prices too high or too low?

This is a common question I receive, often with the implicit assumption that prices in the US are too high. One key question to consider is, what are we trying to optimize? Tyler Cowen has a very good and brief post talking about drug prices and makes the case that (i) the supply of new…

Quotation of the Day

Sometimes I hear tech people saying they are building machines that think like people. Then I report this ambition to neuroscientists and their response is: That would be a neat trick, because we don’t know how people think. David Brooks, “Many People Fear A.I.: They Shouldn’t” NY Times.