Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Politico.com has an interesting series of articles titled Obamacare 2.0, which examines different perspectives on how to improve the Affordable Care Act. One common theme in about half the articles is that the ACA does not do enough to cut healthcare spending. The rise in healthcare spending over the past few decades has been significant. In…
Many health policy researchers talk about bending the cost curve; this means reducing the rate of health care spending below GDP growth. U.S. health spending, however, has consistently grown faster than GDP for nearly a century. Woodward and Wang show that this relationship is surprisingly stable over time, even after the advent of large government…
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Gross National Product (GNP), and National Income measures attempt to measure how much economic activity took place during a specified amount of time (usually a year). Yet many people do not know the difference between these measures. Today, I’ll briefly review these differences by describing how they are calculated by the…
Watch the relationship between GDP/capita and Life Expectancy evolve over time: Gapminder World.
Jonathan Rowe’s essay (“Our Phony Economy“) in the June edition of Harper’s Magazine criticizes the blind use of GDP as the only measure of the economy. GDP by definition looks at the total quantity of good produced in a given year. Rowe wisely notes that solely relying on GDP can omit some important aspects which…