Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at Supporting Safer Healthcare. My favorite posts include: Price pharmaceuticals like software licenses. DMCB on co-op health insurance. The NHS ponders mandatory, private long-term care insurance.
Vasectomies are countercyclical: Lawrence Ross, a professor of urology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says: “We’re seeing about twice as many men coming in for vasectomy consultations as we did a year ago.”
Ideas for health reform from the Society of Actuaries. How to save money: Don’t make doctors get a bachelor’s degree. Do we have too much medical care? “…35 to 45 percent of prescriptions may have no effect on the disease for which they are prescribed and that as little as 10 percent of diseases are…
President Obama addressed the American Medical Association in Chicago today. His goal was push through his health care reform agenda. On Saturday, his Weekly Address also focused on health care reform. What is this agenda and how will it be paid for? Obama wants a public health care plan for the uninsured. The total cost…
Cato Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner is not a big fan of some health care reforms that are being proposed. He reviews recent health reform proposals in his Obamacare article. I review a few of his arguments below. Employer Mandate. Tanner believes employer mandates are a bad idea and I wholeheartedly agree. Large firms can…
The minimum wage will increase from $6.55 to $7.25 next month. David Neumark thinks writes that we should delay the minimum wage increase. I agree. Innovation in baseball ticket pricing. Best cities to live in as ranked by The Economist or median house price to median income ratio. Solving health care with a public plan co-op. Tyler…
Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become very popular among development economists. This programs pay poor families to have their children attend school and/or get vaccinated. Some of the larger programs include Bolsa Família in Brazil and Oportunidades in Mexico. Should economists support CCTs that pay the poor to get vaccinated? This depends on 2 factors: 1)…
Sick and tired of today’s health care system? Joe Paduda hosts this weeks Health Reform HWR, where scholars, professionals, and pundits all give their opinion of how to improve our healthcare system.
From the USA Today, here are the wait times to see a doctor in the following cities: Boston: 49.6 Philadelphia: 27 Los Angeles: 24.2 Houston: 23.4 Washington, D.C.: 22.6 San Diego 20.2 Minneapolis: 19.8 Dallas: 19.2 New York: 19.2 Denver: 15.4 days Miami: 15.4 days The first thing that jumps out from these numbers is that…
Let us say you are a person trying to choose between buying bananas and oranges. What you are trying to do is maximize a utility function u(x,y) where x represents bananas and y represents oranges. You can not buy an infinite amount of each however. This is subject to a budget constraint. Thus, we have…