Why does healthcare in America seem so broken? There’s actually a very simply reason: the people receiving the care are not the people paying for the care. As always, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Russ Roberts breaks it down:
So why doesn’t a hospital work better? The answer I think, is [...]
Division of Labour: I fall victim to the drug war:
As I’ve mentioned, I had transplant surgery on Tuesday. After removing my IV lines, the doctors put me on the controlled substance Percocet for pain relief, to be taken as needed up to 4x daily. (Note: the stuff works.) Under federal rules, I had [...]
I haven’t been organized enough to write here for quite a while. I did, however, find some time to get into a discussion about health insurance over at Coyote Blog.
You may find it interesting.
Yesterday, I read a very interesting op-ed about universal coverage: Bad Medicine For Health Care.
Individual mandate supporters typically justify the policy by citing the problem of uncompensated care. When uninsured patients receive health services but don’t pay for them, the rest of us end up footing the bill one way or another. So [...]
Everyone “knows” that Canadian’s get better healthcare than Americans do. After all, not only do Canadians live longer but their healthcare is free too!
Recently, June O’Neill and Dave O’Neill submitted a new working paper to NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research), comparing the U.S. and Canadian healthcare systems. Their results may surprise you.
First,
It [...]
Robert Hanson suggests that we cut our healthcare spending by up to 50%. Why?
Am I being too allegorical? Then let me speak plainly: our main problem in health policy is a huge overemphasis on medicine. The U.S. spends one sixth of national income on medicine, more than on all manufacturing. But health policy [...]
Greg Mankiw hosted a brief back-and-forth about the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and how it will be renewed. First, the President’s position.
We think the “C” in SCHIP stands for “children”. Over the past several years, adults have been added to SCHIP. Some were parents of kids with health insurance, others [...]
Mitt Romney recently wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal comparing his own healthcare plan to Hillary Clinton’s plan. He tried his best to present his plan as a small-government solution to the healthcare problem.
As governor of Massachusetts, I led the fight for reforms that used free markets and innovation, rather than [...]
The cost of healthcare goes up every year. Prescription drugs get more expensive too. But, even though they get more expensive, they’re different from the rest of healthcare. While the rest of healthcare was increasing in cost by 6-7%, prescription drugs were only increasing in cost at the rate of 1%!
What caused this remarkably slow [...]
This story (Ban Sought on Cold Medicine for Very Young - New York Times) made my pharmacist wife shake her head.
It seems more than a little overkill to ban an entire class of medicines just because a few doctors start jumping up and down and yelling “There’s no proof that it works! No proof!”
And look [...]