Can Health Care Reform Save the Economy?

In the run-up of real estate and stock market prices, demand for labor in the construction, real estate, finance industry was high.  With the drastic drop in real estate and stock market prices, the demand for loan officers, construction workers and investment bankers has dropped.  Individuals who have been laid must find a new job.…

Cuban Exports: Sugar, Cigars…and Cancer drugs?

Cuba is well known for its high quality cigars and sugar production, but is less well-known for its production of high quality pharmaceuticals.  According to MSNBC, “With more than 7,000 scientists dedicated to researching new drugs, Cuba has one of the most sophisticated biotech industries in the developing world. Last year the country earned $350…

Prevention and Cost

More evidence that although preventive may improve patient health, it may also increase costs.  (See also my post from 12 Feb 2008). Afschin Gandjour (2009) “Aging diseases – do they prevent preventive health care from saving costs?”  Health Economics, v18(3): 355-362.

The History of Least Squares

Let us say you have 10 observations of 2 different variables.  How do you determine which of the observations to use?  Should you throw out the outliers?  Should you only include the most similar values?  Does more observations increase or decrease the amount of measurement error? These problems can be answered by the discipline of Statistics.…

Newspapers: Do we need them?

Denver’s Rocky Mountain News: closed.  Seattle’s Post Intelligencer: closed.  San Diego’s Union Tribune: sold to a private equity firm.  The demise of the newspaper has been reported across different media.  The question is, do we really need newspapers or can the internet do just as good a job?  Below, I look at all the sections of…