Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Section 8 housing vouchers uses government funds to subsidize low-income households when paying rent to private landlords. While the program may drive up rent somewhat, it does allow low-income households (that are lucky enough to get the voucher) to afford higher quality, more stable housing. But the Section 8 program was not the idea of…
I recently finish a very interesting book on drugs and addiction titled Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction. The book was written by Judith Grisel, who is a not only a professor and neuroscientist, but also a former drug addict. The book describes the process of addiction, and how different types of illicit…
I am reading an interesting book called Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and The End of the American Century by George Packer. In the heat of the moment, however, how much of foreign policy is made based on rigorous academic research? but in foreign policy, in the heat of the moment, dealing with lots of misinformation,…
A typical answer is that the cost of R&D is very high. However, an interesting book by–César Hidalgo titled Why Information Grows–offers a more conceptual rationale. Medicinal pills embody little information, as their active compound is usually a small and relative simple molecule. Yet medicinal pills can be extremely useful and valuable. Why? To understand…
The answer is not raw brain processing power, but rather it is our ability to learn from others. At least that is the argument from Joseph Henrich’s book The Secret of our Success. Slate Star Codex has an excellent book review. Consider the following graph comparing human, chimpanzee and orangutan intelligence. Another interesting quotation from…
In the book Overcharged, authors Charles Silver and David Hyman identify a number of problems with the current health care system. Third party payment under a fee-for-service system means that providers have an incentive to provide more rather than less care. Further, because the people receiving the services (patients) are not the ones who are footing…
A recently finished reading Prohibition: A Concise History by W.J. Rorabaugh. The history is interesting throughout and concise indeed at only 133 pages. Some interesting excerpts include: Whenever a substance is banned two things happen. First, the price goes up, and second, the product returns in more concentrated form, or a replacement appears. The high risk…
Conservatives may be surprised to ehar that one of the best ways to strengthen monogamous marriage is more equally distributed income…One standard conservative argument against antipoverty policies is their cost: taxes burden the affluent and, by reducing their incentive to work, lower overall economic output. But if one goal of the policy is to bolster…
Without a doubt, medicine has made tremendous gains over the last decades and even more progress when viewed across centuries. Often to treat diseases, physicians and researchers identify a single or primary pathway that is causing the disease. Maybe there is a gene mutation which causes an abnormality. Maybe there is a bacteria or virus…
How do you do cost effectiveness the right way? Peter Neumann–a colleague of mine at Precision Health Economics–edits a book to explain how to do just that. Neumann and Gillian D. Sanders, Louise B. Russell, Joanna E. Siegel, and Theodore G. Ganiats have produced a second edition of their classic text Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. The…