Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
According to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, over 1% of all children below the age of 12 were victims of maltreatment in 2004. Child abuse cases appear frequently on the news and it is truly a sad situation. Most people’s first reaction is that we need more stringent supervision of parents and the…
Programs such as Medicaid and Medicare aim to expand health insurance to those currently uninsured. These programs certainly accomplish this goal, but they also crowd out private insurance. This means that an individual who has private health insurance may decide to use public insurance instead. This would mean that society is simply substituting individual payment…
Katherine Baicker and Douglas Staiger (2004) have a working paper detailing how states often expropriate federal health care funds to use in their general budget. The paper shows that while federal dollars may not always reach the intended destination, these programs can still be somewhat effective in improving health outcomes. DSH Program Federal Medicaid Disproportionate…
Medpage Today recently released some statistics regarding the prevalence of smoking cessation among Germans with serious health diseases (“Smokers Can’t Say No in the Face of Serious Circulatory Disease“). “…the investigators found that among those with a single disorder, the proportion of current smokers among ever-smokers ranged from 29% for myocardial infarction to 44.4% for…
Fabio Bertranou (1999) in his article in Health Policy gives a concise summary of attempted health insurance reforms in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. He looks at three cases: Chile’s reform in the 1980s and Argentina’s and Colombia’s reforms in the 1990s. He cites three major issues each nation faces: Does open enrollment…
Passed in 1978, Proposition 13 was a ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to limit property taxes to a 1% of a homes value. The amendment also capped the annual growth rate in property value assessment at 2% per year until the house is resold. Â William Fischel (1989) argues in âDid Serrano Cause…
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…
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…