Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Why do the Orthodox Jews have so much political power in Israel? Why are third parties in the U.S. so weak? These phenomenon can be explained by the Banzhof power index. The index is calculated as follows. Let us look at the Israeli election in 2003 for the Knesset. Here are the voting results of…
A pair of interesting essays are available at Cato-Unbound. Robin Hanson argues that the best way to help patients is to cut U.S. medical spending in half. He argues that there has been little evidence that increasing medical spending increases health outcomes. The best evidence comes from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. The RAND HIE…
While almost all economists will argue that a single payer health care system is inefficient, many economists support the idea on redistributive ground. Taxing the young and healthy–either directly through taxes or by forcing them to buy non-actuarially fair insurance–and giving the money to pay for the medical care for the old and sick seems…
The International Herald Tribune reports that U.S. pain medicine use has increased 88%. Is that a good thing? Many people will rush to claim that these figures show how pain medication is being abused in the United States (see Brett Favre or Rush Limbaugh). Others will claim that big Pharma’s advertising is leading people to…
Below is a summary of some of the interesting points in the lecture of Mathias Kifman. Gouveia model This is a topping up political economy model. First, we have individuals who get utility from consumption and health care. There are two types: high risk πh and low risk πl. There are also two incomes, yi:…
What exactly is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposing in his health care initiative unveiled early this year? Below I briefly summarize his press release, as to what the reforms will entail and then follow with some of my comments. Individual Mandate All individuals must have a minimum level of insurance. Children Children of families whose income…
The Washington Post (“Senate likely to Back…“) reports that the Senate will support a plan to remove the legislative barriers against the importation of pharmaceuticals from other countries. According to the article: “The provision would allow consumers to buy prescription drugs from Canada and permit commercial distributors to obtain them from Canada, Japan, Austria, Switzerland…
“…in a similar way, the slow growth of the coloring industry in the U.S. before the First World War was largely due to patent protection: most patents were held by the large German companies, such as Bayer, BASF, Hoechst and IG Farben. The chemical industry in the US was so underdeveloped, that during the First…
Do increases in government spending affect health outcomes? While this seems like a simple question, proving whether or not spending impacts outcomes is difficult. There are questions of reverse causality: the governments of countries or regions with more serious health problems ceteris paribus may decide to increase their allocation of health spending; thus one may…
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), there is an interesting article about public health interventions to combat influenza epidemics. These nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) include closure of schools, churches, and theaters. The authors find the following results: “…cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had…