International Health Care Systems – Page 24

Is Britain’s goal to reduce hospital size beneficial to consumers?

2006-01-31Jason Shafrin

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…

Money Trail May Mark Path of New Pandemics

2006-01-27Jason Shafrin1 Comment

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…