- Scripts-Medco Merger.
- Are Medicare’s Wellness initiatives a ‘farce’?
- Medical cost trends: the good and bad news.
- CMS CHIP Enrollment Reports.
- My favorite b-ball player joining the Bucks staff.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2011.
Tags: Links
Planet Money has a very interesting article about software patents and companies who exist for the sole purpose of buying these assets and suing other companies. Computer programmers themselves don’t even like their own patents. In previous posts, I’ve made arguments for limiting patents for pharmaceuticals and the cases for software patents is even stronger. An excerpt from the article:
For a long time, the patent office would have agreed with Rick Mc Leod. For a long time, the patent office was very reluctant to grant patents for software at all.
For decades, the patent office considered software to be like language. A piece of software was more like a book or an article. You could copyright the code, but you couldn’t patent the whole idea.
In the 1990s, the Federal courts stepped in and started chipping away at this interpretation. There was a couple big decisions, one in 1994 and another in 1998, which overturned the patent office completely.
A flood of software patents followed. A lot of people in Silicon valley wish that had never happened, including a very surprising group: computer programmers.
“I worked on a whole bunch of patents in my career over the years and I have to say that every single patent is nothing but crap,” says Stephan Brunner, a programmer.
Brunner says software patents on his own work don’t even make sense to him.
I can’t tell you for the hell of it what they’re actually supposed to do. The company said we have to do a patent on this. … Personally, when I look at them, I’m not proud at all. It’s just like mungo mumbo jumbo that nobody understands and makes no sense from an engineering standpoint whatsoever.
These patents cause problems for innovative companies, particularly those in Silicon Valley.
“We’re at a point in the state of intellectual property where existing patents probably cover every behavior that’s happening on the Internet or our mobile phones today,” says Chris Sacca, the venture capitalist. “[T]he average Silicon Valley start-up or even medium sized company, no matter how truly innovative they are, I have no doubt that aspects of what they’re doing violate patents right now. And that’s what’s fundamentally broken about this system right now.”
How important are patents? Well, look how much big tech firms are paying for them.
In early July, the bankrupt tech company Nortel put its 6,000 patents up for auction as part of a liquidation. A bidding war broke out among Silicon Valley powerhouses…The portfolio eventually sold to Apple and a consortium of other tech companies including Microsoft and Ericsson. The price tag: $4.5 billion dollars….
That’s $4.5 billion on patents that these companies almost certainly don’t want for their technical secrets. That $4.5 billion won’t build anything new, won’t bring new products to the shelves, won’t open up new factories that can hire people who need jobs. That’s $4.5 billion dollars that adds to the price of every product these companies sell you. That’s $4.5 billion dollars buying arms for an ongoing patent war.
Tags: Intellectual Property, Intellectual Ventures, Lawsuits, Patents, Software
The latest edition of the Cavalcade of Risk is up at My Personal Finance Journey. In particular, check out this week’s Top 3 Editor’s Picks. There just might be appearance by your favorite health economist.
Tags: CoR
In Germany, poor and middle class individuals must use public insurance, but well-off Germans can choose between using public and private insurance.
“In Germany, about 90% of the population is publicly insured (Colombo & Tapay, 2004). Buying public insurance is mandatory for dependent employees with a regular employment contract as long as their income does not exceed the so-called compulsory insurance threshold. The public insurance premium equals a certain percentage (nowadays about 15% that are equally shared between the employer and the employee) of gross income up to the so-called contribution ceiling, and equal to it thereafter.”
Why would someone want private insurance? Coverage is universal in the public system and the deductibles and co-payments are limited. Here’s why”
“Contributions for private health insurance are mainly based on health and age, so buying private insurance is especially attractive for young individuals. As a consequence of this, and because of the fact that private insurers are allowed to reject individuals, the risk pool of the private insurers is much better than in the public system…Privately insured individuals can buy better care, e.g. treatment by the head doctor in a hospital or a single room in a hospital, but this comes at a higher price. Deductibles and co-payments are much more common, and many insurers offer a rebate if an individual did not use medical services in the past calendar year.”
In fact, a paper by Hullegie and Klein (2011) finds that individuals with private insurance are much less likely visit a doctor. This is likely due to adverse selection although moral hazard may also play a role since private insurance plans have higher copayments and deductibles.
- Hullegie, P. and Klein, T. J. (2010), The effect of private health insurance on medical care utilization and self-assessed health in Germany. Health Economics, 19: 1048–1062. doi: 10.1002/hec.1642
Tags: Adverse Selection, German, Germany, Moral Hazard, private insurance
The answer is yes.
Project Phoenix is the name of the SETI Institute’s research project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Project Phoenix uses the world’s largest telescopes (40 to 300 meters in diameter) to scrutinize the vicinities of nearby, sun-like stars. Moffitt researcher John J. Heine, Ph.D., adapted signal detection computer algorithms developed at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute to detect breast cancer.
SETI has a slightly different problembut you could put it in the same context, Dr. Heine explains, comparing the searchfor tumors in breasts to the search forcivilizations in the universe.“They’re tryingto dig a coherent signal out of random noise. But the detection task in mammogramsis more or less attempting to findone somewhat coherent signal buried inanother statistically similar signal,” he says,using the term “coherent” in the loosecontext to mean long-range.
Idea cross-pollination can occur in some strange ways.
Tags: Alien, Breast Cancer, SETI
- Primary Care is Dead.
- Pot critics in Colorado.
- Wilbon: Pay college players.
- Money–>Response.
- Effect of ARVs on QoL.
- How standards proliferate.
- How Eric Cantor, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell busted the budget.
Tags: Links
Find the best blog posts from across the health policy wonk-o-sphere as Julie Ferguson host’s this week’s HWR at Workers’ Comp Insider.
Tags: HWR
According to The American:
“Between 1966 and 2007, the entire increase in the size of government relative to the economy resulted from growth in tax-financed health spending.
… as a share of GDP, publicly financed health spending in 2007 was five times as large as it was in 1965 (the year immediately before Medicare and Medicaid began). In contrast, the share of the economy attributable to government spending on all other activities unrelated to health was identical in 1966 and 2007.”
Tags: Debt, Federal Spending, Medicare
According to this article, the answer is:
“Both policies decreased medication adherence. The days’ supply policy [decreasing the days supply of each prescription from 100 to 34 days] had a much larger effect on adherence than did the copayment increase. Total Medicaid spending declined from the days’ supply policy, but the copayment policy resulted in a net increase in Medicaid expenditures.”
If someone is very sick, the time/inconvenience cost to refill a prescription seems to be a more important factor than the out-of-pocket cost. This is true even for the Medicaid population, which is of course made up of exclusively low income individuals. Many economists measure the elasticity of demand with respect to price, but health economists may need to start constructing a demand elasticity measure with respect to inconvenience.
Tags: Adherence, Copayments, Drugs, Pharmaceuticals, Prescription Drugs, Prescription Length
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