Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Today I attended a seminar where Elsa Artadi presented her paper on: “Going into Labor: Earnings vs. Infant Survival in Rural Africa.” Artadi asked the question ‘why do families not optimize childbearing to coincide with months of minimal infant mortality?’ Artadi demonstrated that infant mortality rates vary significantly from month to month in Sub-Saharan Africa…
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…
The Washington Post reports that President George W. Bush will offer âNew Tax Breaks for Medical Expensesâ? in his State of the Union speech on January 31 at 9pm ET. Part of this proposal is to make personal expenditures on health expenditures tax deductible and to expand health savings accounts. When examining the health insurance…
A handful of studies have shown that people who drink one or two glasses of wine per day generally live longer than people who do not drink or who drink beer. Does wine really increase longevity? An article on the Medpage Today website suggests that Eating Well May Explain Wine Drinkers’ Better Health. Prior studies…
In the United States today, many employees receive compensation in the form of health insurance in addition to pecuniary remuneration. Health insurance, however, is tax deductible when it is received from an individual’s employer while wages are not. A Health Affairs report shows that this tax expenditure from excluding health insurance from the federal income…
Massachusetts has proposed a health care bill which four major components: Mandatory insurance for all Massachusetts residents Firms who do not offer insurance to their employees are subject to a payroll tax of: 5% for firms having between 11 and 100 employees and 7% for firms having over 100 employees. Firms employing 10 employees or…
Welcome to Health Care Economist. This site aims to provide unbiased economic analysis of health care issues currently facing the United States and the rest of the world. Your feedback on any of my posts is greatly appreciated.