Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Chris Weber is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stony Brook University. Currently he is conducting a survey on Interet advertising and American politics. “This survey is designed to help us understand what Americans like you think about internet advertising, modern campaigns, and politics. As part of a larger national project, your participation will…
This week on NPR’s “Fresh Air” radio program is an interesting interview with Dr. Jerome Groopman. Dr. Groopman has recently written a book titled How Doctors Think. The interview is available at the NPR website, but below I have a brief excerpt from the book. “This book is about what goes on in a doctor’s…
It’s the first day of “March Madness” and already my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has been bounced from the tournament. If you’re looking for an interesting article about how you should choose your NCAA tournament bracket for next year, check out the N.Y. Times article “Top Seeds can often mislead in NCAA bracket.”
Consumer-directed health plans (CDHP) have been a topic of much interest in the United States of late. In order to increase competition between health plans, in 1996 the German government began a program to allow consumers to have a free choice of their social health insurers plan. Since the federal government sets a high minimum…
A 2007 NBER working paper by Banerjee, Iyer and Somanathan presents the following facts: “In Nepal, access to schools is ten times better in the best districts compared to the worst. For Kenyan provinces, this ratio is 8:1; it is more than 2:1 for both Indian states and Russian regions and slightly over 1.5:1 for…
This week’s edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at MSSP Nexus Blog.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980) .
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,…
Economists throughout recent history have created models in search of answering the following question: what is the optimal income tax structure? Optimal is generally defined by some social welfare function. While liberals generally favor progressive taxes over proportional or regressive taxes for ideological reasons, this paper makes an argument for progressive taxes by employing economic…
As an economist with libertarian leanings, last week was a great one to display the imperfection of government action. Below are some of the lowlights: Scooter Libby was convicted for leaking the identity of a CIA agent (Washington Post article). A Justice Department audit found that “the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out…