Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
David Whelan chronicles the rise (and possibly future fall) of Medicare Advantage programs in his article “Unfilled Prescription” in Forbes. Earlier laws privatizing Medicare, starting with a pilot program in 1985, were written to give insurance companies only 95% of the money otherwise spent per Medicare member. The insurers were supposed to figure out how…
Paul Polak’s book Out of Poverty could have just as easily been titled “How to get rich: a guide for small-time farmers in developing countries” or “Marketing to dollar-a-day earners.” Polak’s book states that donations –especially those run through the developing country government–will not end poverty. They have not so far. One reason is that…
Wikio has their own ranking system of the top health blogs. The Healthcare Economist blog was ranked as #46 as of today.
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review has been posted at The Health Care Blog by Brian Klepper.
Gruber (1994) shows that the costs of employer-provided health insurance benefits are passed on to employees through lower wages. But do employees with higher expected medical expenses have their wages reduced by a higher amount to reflect the additional medical costs to employers? This may not be the case if employers can not observe the…
According to the U.S. News and World Report UC San Diego was ranked as the tenth best economics department in the U.S.
KBPS reports that Google will begin digitizing tens of thousands of library books at my current school, UC San Diego (UCSD). Why was UCSD chosen? Google states that UCSD has an “exceptional collection of social sciences and east asian books.” Within six months, all UCSD books will be available online.
Most economics simplify markets and assume that there is one market price. In reality, however, we observe significant price dispersion. Because of this, we see that that searching for the lowest price–while costly–can buyers to superior outcomes. George Stigler (1961) is a seminal paper on the Economics of Information which I will review here. When…
Let us assume that there are two types of people: smart people an dumb people. Smart people’s test scores are normally distributed about 80% and dumb people’s tests scores are normally distributed about 40% on their test. If we observe the test score of one person, how do we know if they are smart or…
Medicare is inefficient and expensive. Medicare has been expanded through Medicare Part D, which covers prescription drugs. Can expanding an inefficient, expensive system be a good thing? Gary Becker argues yes. Since drugs have high fixed research costs but low marginal costs, having the government pay for drugs can increase innovation. In fact, a working…