Humana’s YouTube Videos

Why is health care so expensive?  How does insurance work? Health insurance giant Humana has some answers available on YouTube.  These brief, two minute videos give a nice introduction to some important health care and health insurance concepts.  The videos so clear and easy to understand anyone could understand it.   Health experts will of…

Too Small to Fail

In “Too Small to Fail, ” The Washington Monthly writes on the success of conservatively-managed small banks in the midst of the financial market collapse.  Why are small banks succeeding?  First, they are running their business more conservatively; in the tradition of, well, traditional bankers.  Secondly, they develop personal relationships with customers giving them superior information about their…

Raise the gas tax now!

It’s time to raise the gas tax.  An economist proposing a tax increase?  Yes. Increasing taxes overall is rarely beneficial for the economy, but raising the gas tax will increase the welfare of the country.  In earlier posts, I wrote that a higher gas tax makes a lot of sense.  An increased gas tax will…

Does P4P improve quality?

Pay-for-performance (P4P) is the latest rage among health wonks as to how to improve the health care system. But does P4P really improve quality? Mullen, Frank and Rosenthal (2008) hope to answer this question. One would initially believe that paying physicians to perform certain medically necessary tasks will improve quality. Further, some P4P involves structural…

Marriage and weight gain

Do people gain weight after marriage?  A paper by Jeffrey and Rick (2002) says yes.  Using data collected from 2528 workers over a 2 year period, the authors estimated the effect of marriage and divorce on weight gain.  They found the following: Getting married increases BMI by 0.70 for men and 0.96 for women.  For…

Flu Surveillance

Google searches as a public health resource: Google.org has released Flu Trends, an online reporting tool for flu-related search activity. It’s long been theorized that Google’s search data would be useful to predict epidemics. This is the first time they’ve released a tool like this to the public. As they say on the main page: We have found a…