Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Getting Obamacare subsidies may be too easy or too hard depending on your perspective. From MSN: In May 970,000 people had citizenship data errors in their Obamacare applications. As of August, 450,000 of those cases have been resolved, 210,000 are in progress and 60,000 new documents arrive every day. The 310,000 remaining applicants will receive…
Obamacare mandates that individuals need to buy health insurance or else they will face a financial penalty. This threat, however, is not credible unless there are affordable health insurance options for most Americans. What are states doing to hold down health insurance rates in the ACA’s health insurance exchanges? A RWJF working paper provides some…
A number of companies, such as 23andMe, allow individuals to sequence their own genes in order to attempt to determine if they have an elevated risk for certian diseases. This sector has largely been unregulated…until now. The Economist reports, On November 22nd the FDA…sent a stern letter to 23andMe, a genetic-testing firm. Despite “more than…
When a problem appears, politicians often call for more regulation. Wall Street collapses? Frank-Dodd. Health insurance doesn’t cover pre-existing conditions? PPACA. Need to protect patient privacy? HIPAA. But are there downsides to increased regulation? A paper by Cotet and Benjamin (2013) examines just this question. In particular, they examine the welfare implications of regulations that…
When Alfred Caronia worked for a drug company, he promoted some drug’s off-label use. The Department of Justice did not take kindly to Caronia’s behavior and sued him for violating the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA). He was convicted, but appealed the conviction. Caronia argued that this commercial speech is protected by the first…
Last weekend, I watched the movie How to Survive a Plague. The movie discusses the AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Although I am not a movie critic (you can see reviews by professional critics here), I do want to discuss one key issue that the move discusses: should the FDA liberalize its…
The episode may also serve as a reminder that the more layers of regulation we put on commerce, the less resilient is the system when something goes wrong. – Jim Hamilton For Californians (like myself) who want to know why gas prices spiked more than 50 cents in about a week, you can read a…
China standard is living as funds from export industries eventually trickle down into the earnings of (some) ordinary Chinese. Where are the Chinese spending their newfound wealth? In part, the answer is self-beautification procedures. According to the Economist: “China performs more cosmetic surgery than any country except America and Brazil. Almost 1.3m licensed procedures were…
In many cases, only a handful of suppliers produce vaccines for a given disease. In fact, for several vaccine types the U.S. has fewer suppliers than countries with a smaller market and a higher level of government purchase. One reason for this finding could be strict government regulation. All vaccines must be approved by the…
“We must have a strategy that regulates the financial system as a whole, in a holistic way, not just its individual components.” Ben S. Bernanke, “Financial Reform to Address Systemic Risk” at the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., March 10, 2009 In a 2010 short paper, Brunnermeier, Hansen, Kashyap, Krishnamurthy and Lo (2010)…