Cavalcade of Risk
The Cavalcade of Risk (#14) is now posted by Micheal Cannon on the Cato-at-Liberty website.
Adding more time to your day
Getting more done in less time is the key to a productive day. Working efficiently is important for not just graduate students, but anyone who has to manage many tasks at once. The “All-but-dissertation Survival Guide” gives a few good pointers. Five Secrets to Add More Time to your Day, by Carrie Silver-Stock, MSW, LCSW…
Legislating your diet
Today, the New York City Board of Health has decided to ban artificial trans fats at city restaurants. The New York Times (“…Trans Fats“) reports that “Trans fats are believed to be harmful because they contribute to heart disease by raising bad cholesterol and lowering good cholesterol at the same time. Some experts say that…
The beneficial effect of State intervention…
An interesting quotation from A.V. Dicey‘s Law and Public Opinion in England regarding the role of the State in society. “The beneficial effect of State intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, whilst its evil effects are gradual and indirect, and lie out of sight…Nor…do most people…
Fee for service vs. capitation: How financial incentives affect medical service provision
Today I will be briefly be reviewing four recent articles which examine how physician payment methods affect the amount of medical service provision. GP reimbursement in Ireland Madden, Nolan and Nolan (Health Econ 2005) use a quasi-experimental framework to see how changing physician compensation affects the number of doctors visits. In Ireland approximately 30% of…
What insurance people are really like
An interesting post from Joe Paduda of Managed Care Matters gives us an inside look of ‘What insurance people are really like.’
Physician licensure and quality: Part VII
One final example of licensure’s impact on quality is given by a 1978 study of the quality of contact lens fitting. The study looked at 502 households who had been fitted for contacted lenses in the previous three years and were still wearing contacts. The study was conducted with the cooperation of the American Academy…
Health Wonk Review is up
This week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at the Cato@Liberty website.
Physician licensure and quality: Part VI
On February 4th, I wrote on the American Medical Association’s (AMA) role in modern medicine. Today I will give further commentary regarding the AMA by reviewing a seminal paper by Reuben Kessel (1958). The paper describing the AMA’s development in the first half of the twentieth century. The AMA has two main goals: 1) a…
Physician licensure and quality: Part V
During the past few days, I have written extensively on the reasoning behind why society would wish to create a licensing arrangement for some professions. Today, I will review Hayne Leland’s 1979 paper which develops a mathematical model which explicitly describes the welfare implications of licensure. Model Leland uses a Akerlof style set-up where the…