Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Politicians are faced with a serious dilemma in the near future: reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and spend billions of dollars on a single-payer government health program or fail to renew the program and leave many children uninsured and many constituents angry. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports (“Several Lawmakers…“) that the SCHIP…
Ever wonder what exactly are your Congressional representatives’ views on health care? A new website from Research!America and Parade look into just this question. Currently, their ‘Your Congress. Your Health.‘ website is asking members of the public to vote on which health issues/questions they want to be asked of their representatives. According to the website,…
There was an interesting post on the Economist’s Free Exchange blog regarding the Health Insurance voucher debate (A veto for…). The post contains a critique of a healthcare voucher plan put forth by Ezekiel Emmanuel and Victor Fuchs in The New Republic. The pros and cons of the plan are certainly interesting but the blog’s…
I have recently been receiving some comments suggesting that one way to cut health care costs would be to reduce CEO pay. Would cutting CEO pay be beneficial to society? Ideologically, I believe that markets—and not the government—should determine wages of all workers. If the U.S. government were to put a cap on CEO pay,…
The Century Foundation has a very interesting debate on health care reform (transcript). Below I have cited some of the more interesting points. ERISA. Jacob Hacker, professor of political science at Yale, claims that states attempts at health care reform may be limited by the Employees Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974. According to…
Defining sprawl is difficult. Los Angeles is generally seen to be a leader in sprawl, but in fact Los Angeles is the most densely populated urban area in the U.S; Portland is seen as a model of reducing urban sprawl, but sprawl increased by 25,000 acres in Portland between 1980 and 1990. While population growth…
The future of Social Security is in question. Even Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke warns of the rapidly approaching Social Security “fiscal crisis.”. Individuals at the beginning or middle of their prime working years are unsure of how large (or small) their Social Security benefits will be when they retire. An NBER working paper by…
What is do be done regarding the long waits for those needing a donated organ to save their life? As expected, economists recommend market creation as the solution. Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt argue in the New York Times (“Flesh Trade“) that the creation of a market for organs makes sense.…
Every year Transparency International puts out a Corruption Perceptions Index ranking each country’s corruption level. The index is constructed from a survey of various resident and non-resident country experts as well as business leaders (see methodology here). The 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index gives us one clear conclusion: there is a lot of corruption in the…
Medicaid currently accounts for roughly 50% of all nursing home expenditures and 70% of all bed days. The government mandates that nursing homes provide a uniform level of quality to all residents, regardless of the payer type. Yet one may ask: does this mandate hold in reality? Nursing homes may have an incentive to segregate private insurance…