Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
I just finished reading an interesting book on plumbing. I can just see that I lost half my readers with that last sentence. How can plumbing be interesting? It turns out that if you are interested in health, you must be interested in plumbing. Disposing of human waste is one of the biggest health problems,…
Why is health care so expensive? How does insurance work? Health insurance giant Humana has some answers available on YouTube. These brief, two minute videos give a nice introduction to some important health care and health insurance concepts. The videos so clear and easy to understand anyone could understand it. Health experts will of…
In “Too Small to Fail, ” The Washington Monthly writes on the success of conservatively-managed small banks in the midst of the financial market collapse. Why are small banks succeeding? First, they are running their business more conservatively; in the tradition of, well, traditional bankers. Secondly, they develop personal relationships with customers giving them superior information about their…
The post-election edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Joe Paduda’s Managed Care Matters.
It’s time to raise the gas tax. An economist proposing a tax increase? Yes. Increasing taxes overall is rarely beneficial for the economy, but raising the gas tax will increase the welfare of the country. In earlier posts, I wrote that a higher gas tax makes a lot of sense. An increased gas tax will…
Wayne State University’s Economics Department has a nice webpage with links to helpful economic information. This includes: List of Economics Journals Government Economic Information websites A list of think tanks Information on Financial Markets.
Pay-for-performance (P4P) is the latest rage among health wonks as to how to improve the health care system. But does P4P really improve quality? Mullen, Frank and Rosenthal (2008) hope to answer this question. One would initially believe that paying physicians to perform certain medically necessary tasks will improve quality. Further, some P4P involves structural…
Do people gain weight after marriage? A paper by Jeffrey and Rick (2002) says yes. Using data collected from 2528 workers over a 2 year period, the authors estimated the effect of marriage and divorce on weight gain. They found the following: Getting married increases BMI by 0.70 for men and 0.96 for women. For…
Narrow-mindedness is one of the flaws of human cognition. Often times, perceived conflicts of interests or bias may just be due to narrow-minded thought. For instance, George Bush decided to invade Iraq. While I do not want to argue the merits or demerits of the invasion, likely one of the reasons Bush decided to invade…
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at the Colorado Health Insurance Insider. There are a bunch of great articles analyzing how Obama and the Democratic Congress will change health care in America.