Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
David Cutler and Richard Zeckhauser review “The anatomy of health insurance” in chapter 11 of the Handbook of Health Economics. The chapter provides an overview of the economics field’s insight regarding health insurance. The authors summarize the literature’s findings into 5 main lessons listed below: Risk spreading versus incentives: Health insurance involves a fundamental tradeoff…
Which health state is better? Of course everyone knows that it is better to be healthy then sick, but what if you were faced with the following choice: Scenario A: being too sick to prepare your own meals or dress yourself, but are able to move around the house without fear, Scenario B: being able…
What is economic growth? How can it be understood? One concise explanatino is given by Brad DeLong in an article for Wired (“The Real Shopping Cart Revolution“). In the article, DeLong compares the relative price of flour now to the relative price in the fifteenth to seventeenth and concludes that modern man is 430 times richer…
The 2006-2007 Global Competitiveness Report has been released by World Economic Forum. The rankings can be found at the World Economic Forum website (PDF). “The rankings are drawn from a combination of publicly available hard data and the results of the Executive Opinion Survey, a comprehensive annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, together…
In 5 years, the oldest baby boomers will hit 65 years old. As the boomers begin to retire, this enormous cohort will start to sell off their financial assets in order to finance consumption in their non-working years. One begins to wonder if there will be a stock market crash since equities demand may drop significantly. …
Ten days ago, MedPageToday ran an article (“Hefty Bank Account…“) which claimed that people who have more money are healthier. Using the 2000 Census American Community Survey, the study finds that “a 55-year-old man making about $49,500 per year is 44% more likely to have a functional disability than his neighbor making $57,800 a year.” This…
Greg Mankiw’s Blog looks to online betting for the odds that McCain, Clinton, Giuliani, and Edwards will will the 2008 Presidential Election in his POTUS 2008 post. McCain has the edge, but Hilary Clinton is a close second. Using Bayes rule, however, Mankiw shows that if Edwards were to be the Democratic nominee, he would…
If one does not include Social Security and defined benefit assets, households with heads aged 65-74 have net assets of $190,100. Households with heads aged 75 and above have net assets of $163,100. How do the elderly allocate their assets? Does their portfolio choice change over time? Does it change in response to health shocks? These are the…
In this week’s Economist magazine, one article (“The invisible hand on the keyboard“) asks why economists spend valuable time blogging. Some of the more popular blogs receive thousands of visitors daily, yet why would an economist supply their output (knowledge) for free when they can receive payment from a university, the government, or private business for their work? …
The Health Care Blog has a very interesting post (“Healthcare and the Long Tail“) by Jim Walker. Mr. Walker is a lifelong Philadelphia resident who is the Director of Business Development for the social networking site called MyMedwork. He uses concepts developed in Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail and applies them to the healthcare field. …