Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Tyler Cowen is an economist from George Washington University and a libertarian. Thus, you would expect his answer to this question would be ‘always’. In a recent Bloomberg article discussing whether to privatize government assets (e.g., USPS), he makes a more nuanced argument. First, for consumer goods, it is nearly always good to privatize. Cowen…
How is President Trump planning to keep his campaign promise to improve health care for Veterans? One pathways is through his VA Mission Act of 2018. As the Washington Post reports, this bill would include $55 billion in additional funding for veterans. A key part of this legislation is that it allows for more veterans…
In the case of elderly care services in Sweden, the answer is ‘yes’. In Bergman et al. (2016), the authors… assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009 and estimate how opening to private provision affected mortality rates – an important and not easily contractible quality dimension –…
The Guardian reports that the UK considering privatizing sections of the National Health Service (NHS): A Treasury-commissioned report yesterday recommended measures to chop £6bn from public services budgets over the next two years, with further measures intended to save £15bn a year by 2013. It calls for a shake-up of “back office” administrative and support…
Can a state run petroleum company be as efficient as a private sector company? The answer is a resounding, “yes but…” It is possible that state-run petroleum companies can be efficient as long as they stick to the business of producing oil. Yet Tina Rosenberg’s “The Perils of Petrocracy” article in the N.Y. Times Sunday…