Weekend Links
Are we winning the war on cancer? Where Workers Comp is Heading (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Obesity is contagious? Barcelona wins La Liga. A second opinion on health care reform.
Category: Uncategorized
The cost of being unusual
“Overall the more mixed the crowd, and the greater the number of dimensions of status and achievement, the greater the chance that unusual people will find a means of excelling or just surviving or fitting in. To put it another way, the mixing of populations lowers the cost of being unusual. That’s why gay people…
Effect of Decreasing Medicare Reimbursement Rates on CABG Surgeries
Many researchers claim that decreasing physician reimbursement will decrease Medicare expenditures. Mechanically, this is true, but in reality, physicians may adjust their treatment behavior to make up for lost income. A study by Yip (1998) evaluates how change in reimbursement for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgeries affected the volume of CABG surgeries physicians perform. …
Quotation of the day: Does the market ‘work’?
“Gross misperception, especially in the minds of noneconomists, often prompts the claim that ‘the market’ (or ‘capitalism’) either works or does not work without constraints, a claim that is demonstrably unsupportable, either in analytical logic or in empirical reality.” James M. Buchanan, Nobel prize winning economist
California Counties: The Poor’s last Safety Net
The county government is often the place of last resort for the medically indigent in California. Some counties run hospitals and/or clinics to care for these individuals outside of the Medicaid system. Other counties operate their own HMO to cover Medicaid patients. As I previously described, there are three types of private Medi-Cal HMO systems…
Quotation of the Day: How to reduce crime and cut prison costs
“Classical deterrence theory has long held that the threat of a mild punishment imposed reliably and immediately has a much greater deterrent effect than the threat of a severe punishment that is delayed and uncertain.” From Jeffrey Rosen, “Prisoners of Parole” N.Y. Times Magazine, 10 Jan 2010.
Quotation of the Day
With the business world hurting, the MBA is falling out of favor. In truth, the MBA has been useful for only a few things. Learning basic accounting and statistics skills is helpful in business, but one could learn these skills elsewhere. The MBA is most useful for networking with other future business leaders. Thus, the…
Weekend Links
Thirdhand Smoke and treating PTSD with Tetris. Eastern European healthcare market roundup. Swine flu vaccine for children recalled for potency drop. One of the clearest, most concise explanations of what went wrong during the mortgage meltdown. HIV microbicides? Too bad they don’t work.
House Reform Bill’s Impact on the Number of Uninsured
The CMS’ Office of the Actuary estimates the impact of the House health care reform bill on insurance coverage 10 years in the future: One can see that the number of uninsured drops dramatically, but there will still be over 20 million Americans without insurance. The most interesting and difficult part of the analysis is…
Links
Campaign to reduce hospital-acquired infections. Malpractice litigation accounts for roughly 2-10% of medical expenditures. In Australia: Private hospitals persistently outperform public hospitals. New anti-discrimination law: Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. “The surgical research establishment has told patients what…best suits the surgeons’ economic interests, but not what those patients want and need to know.”