Success Defined
“It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all.” Thomas Watson, Sr
Tag: Quotation
The Medicaid Medical Industrial Complex
“Across the nation, sizeable and forceful groups–a Medicaid medical industrial complex–support welfare medicine, many of them becoming entirely or partially dependent on its funding for their financial viability. Their reliance on the low-income health program puts them at risk of adverse political decisions, but also drives them to exert disproportionate influence over policymakers. Vested interests–professionals,…
Physicians as Engineers
“This can no longer be a profession of craftsmen individually brewing plans for whatever patient comes through the door. We have to be more like engineers building a mechanism whose parts actually fit together, whose workings are ever more finely tuned and tweaked for ever better performance in providing aid and comfort to human beings.”…
Healthcare Summit Quotations
“We are not cutting Medicare benefits. We are trying to eliminate waste.” Vice President Joe Biden, 25 February 2010. “Our country’s too big, too complicated, too decentralized for Washington, a few of us here, just to write a few rules about remaking seventeen percent of the economy all at once.” Senator Lamar Alexander, 25 February 2010.…
Quotation of the day: Does the market ‘work’?
“Gross misperception, especially in the minds of noneconomists, often prompts the claim that ‘the market’ (or ‘capitalism’) either works or does not work without constraints, a claim that is demonstrably unsupportable, either in analytical logic or in empirical reality.” James M. Buchanan, Nobel prize winning economist
Is America in Decline?
In an article in the Atlantic, James Fallows ponders if America is in decline and if so, is there anything we can do about it. One of the more revealing commentaries on America’s prospects comes from an American businessman living in China: “We scream about our problems but as long as we have the immigrants,…
Quotation of the Day: The curious task of economics
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.” F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit.
“Somehow, this time will be different”
“Despite the spectacular failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, some economists insist that Fannie and Freddie need to be kept in place but somehow, just made safer. This optimistic advocacy—which assumes that Fannie and Freddie are like airplanes that need better landing gear—is in spite of the fact that between 1992 and 2008 Fannie…
Genetic Adverse Selection
“…individuals who carry the [Huntington Disease] genetic mutation are up to 5 times as likely as the general population to own long-term care insurance…relatively limited increases in genetic information may threaten the viability of private long-term care insurance.” Oster et al. (2009) “Genetic Adverse Selection: Evidence from Long-Term Care Insurance and Huntington Disease” NBER Working…
Quotation of the Day
“A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.” Daniel Webster