Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In the State of the Union address, President Bush dedicated portions of the speech to the health care problems facing the United States. A summary of his proposals is located on the White House website. I will comment on a few noteworthy additions to the Bush plan, of which I was not aware of during my…
In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, the United States maintained a fairly constant ratio of 141 physicians/100,000 people. In the 60’s, however, politicians began to worry that the supply of doctors would decrease in the near future. In 1963, Congress passes the Health Professions Educational Assistance Act (HPEA) in 1963. Senator Yarborough stated that the…
This is a summary of an article by Robert Moffitt (1986): Often in Public Economics, we come across budget constraints which are piecewise-linear. Some examples are studies of: the negative income tax, Social Security program, food stamp program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and unemployment insurance. Wrinkles to the traditional piecewise linear budget…
A 31 January 2006 Times article (“Smaller is better, says minister in hospitals shake-up“) states that the National Health Service (NHS) hopes to increase the number of small in the UK to counter the trend of recent hospital closings. Is this a good policy? Let’s look at the Pros and Cons: Pros: Smaller, more numerous…
A recent Health Affairs article by Cynthia Smith, Cathy Cowan, Stephen Heffler and Aaron Catlin details the trends in health care spending over the last 25 years. I have compiled their results into a handy graph. In addition the the general overall increase, there are other significant findings. Between 1970 and 2004, out-of-pocket payments decreased…
A January 26th New York Times article (“Prognosis is Mixed for Health Savings“) gives a brief summary of the results of the Health Savings Account (HSA) legislation enacted in 2003. The HSA allows individuals to contribute to a health care savings account using pre-tax dollars; a mechanism for savings is similar to a 401(k). In…
Today’s health care debate in the popular press can be boiled down to the following few points: Health Care is too expensive and we need to make it more ‘affordable,’ While reducing the price, we must maintain individual choice of which physicians they wish to see and which procedures they desire. Switching from a fee-for-service…
Today I attended a seminar where Elsa Artadi presented her paper on: “Going into Labor: Earnings vs. Infant Survival in Rural Africa.” Artadi asked the question ‘why do families not optimize childbearing to coincide with months of minimal infant mortality?’ Artadi demonstrated that infant mortality rates vary significantly from month to month in Sub-Saharan Africa…
A recent article in Nature (“The Scaling Laws of Human Travel“) claims that the flow of money may provide a good model of how diseases spread in modern society. Previous models of how pandemics generally thought that the dispersion would occur slowly over a contiguous geographic region. As air travel becomes more and more common…
The Washington Post reports that President George W. Bush will offer âNew Tax Breaks for Medical Expensesâ? in his State of the Union speech on January 31 at 9pm ET. Part of this proposal is to make personal expenditures on health expenditures tax deductible and to expand health savings accounts. When examining the health insurance…