Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In the book Overcharged, authors Charles Silver and David Hyman identify a number of problems with the current health care system. Third party payment under a fee-for-service system means that providers have an incentive to provide more rather than less care. Further, because the people receiving the services (patients) are not the ones who are footing…
A recently finished reading Prohibition: A Concise History by W.J. Rorabaugh. The history is interesting throughout and concise indeed at only 133 pages. Some interesting excerpts include: Whenever a substance is banned two things happen. First, the price goes up, and second, the product returns in more concentrated form, or a replacement appears. The high risk…
Conservatives may be surprised to ehar that one of the best ways to strengthen monogamous marriage is more equally distributed income…One standard conservative argument against antipoverty policies is their cost: taxes burden the affluent and, by reducing their incentive to work, lower overall economic output. But if one goal of the policy is to bolster…
Without a doubt, medicine has made tremendous gains over the last decades and even more progress when viewed across centuries. Often to treat diseases, physicians and researchers identify a single or primary pathway that is causing the disease. Maybe there is a gene mutation which causes an abnormality. Maybe there is a bacteria or virus…
How do you do cost effectiveness the right way? Peter Neumann–a colleague of mine at Precision Health Economics–edits a book to explain how to do just that. Neumann and Gillian D. Sanders, Louise B. Russell, Joanna E. Siegel, and Theodore G. Ganiats have produced a second edition of their classic text Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. The…
Andrew Soloman has an outstanding article the Guardian discussing the intersection of literature and medicine. He his article about literature on medicine saying saying: Medicine can contribute to literature; narrative practice can strengthen medicine. It behoves writers and doctors to learn each other’s fluencies, because their disparate approaches can add up to singular truths. Of particular…
An interesting post by Nicolas Bagley at the Incidental Economist provides a brief overview of a class he taught on infectious diseases and the law. Looking at diseases ranging from cholera, Spanish flu, polio, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola, Bagley claims that ten key themes emerged: Governments are typically unprepared, disorganized, and resistant to taking steps…
According to one former police officer, the effect of drugs themselves are not the main cause of violence: …drug users aren’t responsible for violence–high people just want to enjoy their high. Drug violence is business violence….the largest causes of drug murders are territorial disputes over market share. If no one will help you defend your property–you can’t trademark…
Pirates don’t only troll the seas. According to a book by Durant and Vergne, they download music illegally, they clone living things, and do any number of actions typically banned by authorities. But not individuals who do illegal activities are deemed pirates by these authors. They define pirates as follows as sharing the following features:…
“First, you push on your territories, where you have no business to be, and where you had promised not to go; secondly, your intrusion provokes resentment, and resentment means resistance. Thirdly, you instantly cry out that the people are rebellious and their act is rebellion…Fourthly, you send out a force to stamp out rebellion; and…