Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University has an interesting paper (“Avian Flu: What should be done“) on the optimal policy to combat avian flu. Below, I cite a few of the more interesting points from his executive summary: Prepare social norms and emergency procedures which would limit or delay the spread of a pandemic. Regular hand…
We are now in the information age. Let’s take a look at the following numbers: Internet World Stats reports that approximately 70% of Americans now have access to the Internet. (This puts it 7th in the world in terms of Internet penetration). Over 85% of physicians have access to high speed internet in their offices.…
In the mid to late 1990s, there was a large backlash against HMOs due to the perception that the “HMO cares more about saving money than it does about them.” People feared that HMO would drop coverage of services which they valued. In this month’s NBER working paper edition, Yu-Chu Shen (2006) looks answer two…
One Social Security reform often suggested is to change the indexation of benefits from a wage inflation measure to a price inflation measure, such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Critics argue that the price of healthcare has increased more than overall CPI and since the elderly spend a higher percentage of their income on…
Life expectancy for low-birthweight babies has increased dramatically in the later half of the 20th century, mostly due to improved medical technology. Prolific use of complex medical equipment and techniques–such as phototherapy, intravenous hyperalimentation, CT scans, etc.–during premature births has increased the average lifetime spending on low-birthdweight babies $39,000 between 1950 and 1990. Is this…
A common justification for Medicare is that the public health insurance system has an overhead cost which is about 2% of claims, while the private sector has administrative costs between 20%-25% of claims. This tells us that Medicare is the best system for America…right? Merrill Mathew’s of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance (CAFI) summarizes…
A very interesting book I recently came across is Arctic Village by Robert Marshall. The book recounts the author’s two year stay in Wiseman, Alaska during the 1930s. Wiseman is a town (if you could call it that) located above the arctic circle and is made up of less than 200 people. The book details…
MedPage Today reports that the National Academy’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) claims that preventable drug errors are widespread in the U.S. It is estimated that 1.5 million American are harmed each year from preventable drug errors; the treatment of these cases adds $3.5 billion of yearly cost. How can we fix this problem? The authors…
Today was a big day for news in the healthcare industry. First, a private equity group agreed to buy HCA (Hospital Corporation of America) in a leveraged buyout deal valued at $21 billion (plus the assumption of $11.7 billion of debt). The Chicago Tribune (“HCA agrees…“) looked to Darren Lehrich of Deutche Bank for analysis: This gives…
For most individuals, dividend taxation is higher than capital gains taxation. In theory, one would believe that corporations would thus elect to hold all their profits as retained earnings (or repurchase outstanding shares) in order to increase the price of the stock as opposed to paying out the profits as dividends, since the tax treatment…