I will be in Washington D.C. from today until Sunday night attending the Institute for Humane Studies Research Colloquium. Blogging will resume on Monday.
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“I mean, a man has to stand for something.”
- James Woodard, wrongfully convicted of killing his girlfriend 27 years ago, on why he did not lie and admit his guilt during one of the twelve times he came up for parole.
“Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.”
“Trade is a social act”
For all my economist peers who are sick and tired of monetary policy, financial option valuations, and esoteric econometric specifications, it may be time for a change. The American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) is holding their second annual conference August 14-16 in Portland, Oregon. The AAWE also publishes the Journal of Wine Economics.
I am sure the members of the AAWE do not mind conducting “research” as to which wines are the highest quality.
Who says economics is the dismal science?
Wikio has their own ranking system of the top health blogs. The Healthcare Economist blog was ranked as #46 as of today.
With the stock market in decline, the credit crunch hovering over, and the fear of a recession growing, I think its time for some Friday humor.
I’ll let personal finance guru Michael Scott of the TV show The Office show us all how to declare bankruptcy.
The Regulating Health Insurance (RHI) blog today named Healthcare Economist as their Blog of the Week for my post on “Doctors, Patients, and the Racial Mortality Gap.” The RHI Health Blog of the Week is awarded to an exceptional health-related post appearing during the previous week.
Other RHI Blog of the Week winners can be found here.
Two years ago, the Healthcare Economist blog was born (first blog post). While readership was slow at first, over the last 6 months of 2007 this blog averaged over 12,000 unique readers per month.
I want to thank these loyal readers for your support, commentary and timely criticisms. I aim to bring more quality information and commentary to the world of health economics in subsequent years.
Thank you again for all of your support.
Best wishes,
-Jason Shafrin
The N.Y. Times has an interesting piece (”…Low-Cost, High Return Marketing“) on small business bloggers. It concludes that consultants are the mostly likely bloggers. Aliza Sherman Risdahl, author of The Everything Blogging Book, comments that “They [consultants] are experts in their fields and are in the business of telling people what to do.â€? A member of the health blogging community, consultant David Harlow of HealthBlawg, is even profiled.
Only a few blog make enough money from advertising to be worthwhile in a purely dollars and sense terms. Nevertheless, the small business blog writers use the sites to network with others, build their reputation, and (hopefully) eventually get hired.
“Getting old ain’t for sissies.”
Lillian Paley, my 95 year-old grandmother
The following list of phrases and their definitions might help you understand the mysterious language of science and medicine. These special phrases are also applicable to anyone working on a Ph.D. dissertation or academic paper anywhere!
“It has long been known” = I didn’t look up the original reference.
“A definite trend is evident” = These data are practically meaningless.
“While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to the questions” = An unsuccessful experiment, but I still hope to get it published.
“Three of the samples were chosen for detailed study” = The other results didn’t make any sense.
“Typical results are shown” = This is the prettiest graph.
“These results will be in a subsequent report” = I might get around to this sometime, if pushed/funded.
“In my experience” = once.
“In case after case” = twice.
“In a series of cases” = thrice.
“Correct within an order of magnitude” = Wrong.
“According to statistical analysis” = Rumor has it.
“A statistically oriented projection of the significance of these findings” = A wild guess.
“A careful analysis of obtainable data” = Three pages of notes were obliterated when I knocked over a glass of pop.
“It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding of this phenomenon occurs”= I don’t understand it.
“After additional study by my colleagues”= They don’t understand it either.
“A highly significant area for exploratory study” = A totally useless topic selected by my committee.
“It is hoped that this study will stimulate further investigation in this field” = I quit.
Here’s an entertaining comic from PhD Comics.
The Healthcare Economist has expanded to radio. For those in the Pensacola, Florida area, you may have heard my appearance at 1:15pm Central time on Rick Outzen’s “IN Your Head Radio” on 1620 WNRP. During the interview, Rick and I discussed the pros and cons of S-CHIP as well as the Dutch health care system reform, which I reported on in this post.
“Un libro abierto es un cerebro que habla; cerrado, un amigo que espera; olvidado, un alma que perdona; destruido, un corazón que llora.”Proverbio Hindú
Nada de lo que el hombre ha sido, es, o será, lo ha sido, lo es ni lo será de una vez para siempre, sino que ha llegado a serlo un buen dÃa y otro buen dÃa dejará de serlo.
José Ortega y Gasset
Here’s an entertaining cartoon posted on Cristina Favreau’s Savvy Entrepreneur website.
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we do know that just ain’t so.”
— Artemus Ward
For information on breast cancer symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and recovery options, BreastCancer.org is a great resource. BreastCancer.org is “…a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing the most reliable, complete, and up-to-date information about breast cancer.”
The American Cancer Society also has reliable information on breast cancer.
More resources are also available at Breast Cancer Hope forum. This site is Comcast’s video-on-demand and internet-based initiative. It offers a support community for those with breast cancer as well as for those dedicated to fighting the disease.
Do you want some hard data concerning healthcare bloggers? For instance, you may want to know the profession of most healthcare bloggers. You may wonder whether or not healthcare bloggers trust other healthcare bloggers. Finally, one may be curious as to the age, sex, and race of a typical healthcare blogger.
If you want answers to these questions, Dmitriy Kruglyak of Trusted.MD has a Healthcare Blogger Survey Report which may interest you.
The Healthcare Economist is off to Europe. I’ll be vacationing in Istanbul for about a week. Afterwards, I will attend the European Science Days summer school on the Economics of Health and Healthcare in Steyr, Austria.
Postings to this blog will resume as soon as I return.
If you’re an economist and in need of a laugh, check out the Stand-up Economist’s Principles of Economics, Translated on YouTube.
Is their a difference between micro-economists and macro economists?
- “The difference of course being that micro economists are people who are wrong about specific things, and macro economists are wrong about things in general.”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”
Aristotle
The Healthcare Economist blog was ranked as one of the top 100 health blogs according to Healthcare100.com [#51]. Some of my other favorite blogs which are also ranked in the top 100 (as of 18 June 2007) are:
- #8: The Health Care Blog.
- #33: Health Affairs Blog.
- #37: The Healthcare IT Guy.
- #48: Insure Blog.
- #51: Healthcare Economist.
- #61: Managed Care Matters.
- #73: World Health Care Blog.
- #81: GoozNews.
- #84: Health Business Blog.
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Help a graduate student with their dissertation by completing the following survey:
The News Media and Immigration Attitudes
This survey is designed to help us understand what Americans like you think about immigration and the news media. We are very interested in your thoughts on this matter and greatly appreciate your participation.
Click here to take the survey:
http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/stu
Do you live in California? Are you interested in health care issues? Then you may be interested in the Cal Health Reform website.
The website has links to various health reform proposals including a summary of Governor Schwarzenegger’s health reform initiative. There is also a brief powerpoint presentation from health economist Jon Gruber of M.I.T. as well as an interesting Myths and Facts page.
From The Onion…
Internet Opens Up Whole New World Of Illness For Local Hypochondriac
“All her life, Janet Hartley has suffered from a host of ill-defined viruses and inexplicable aches and pains, diagnosing herself with everything from diabetes to cancer. But ever since discovering such online medical resources as WebMD, drkoop.com, and Yahoo! Health, the 41-year-old hypochondriac has had a whole new world of imaginary illnesses opened up to her…”
I recently came across an interesting idea based on the HousingMaps model: have individuals report their own illnesses in order to have a better idea of public health. This is the plan for the start-up Who is Sick? website. The site aims to provide health information to the public by tracking and monitoring current and local sicknesses using a Google Maps interface.
I think this is a very interesting idea and possibly important idea, but one question remains: will enough people decide to report their illnesses on their website to make the information gathered meaningful? PT Lee of the Who is Sick website states “…there is some satisfaction of quickly and easily posting you sickness and seeing that many many people will hopefully benefit in some small way from the contribution. Also, most visitors to the site will probably be sick themselves so hopefully, they will post while looking.”
I’m off to Arizona today to watch 3 Milwaukee Brewers Spring Training games between Tuesday and Thursday. My blogging will resume on Friday.
Chris Weber is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stony Brook University. Currently he is conducting a survey on Interet advertising and American politics.
“This survey is designed to help us understand what Americans like you think about internet advertising, modern campaigns, and politics. As part of a larger national project, your participation will provide us with information about the beliefs held by blog readers. We are very interested in your thoughts on this matter and greatly appreciate your participation.”
If you would like to take the survey, please click here.
It’s the first day of “March Madness” and already my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has been bounced from the tournament. If you’re looking for an interesting article about how you should choose your NCAA tournament bracket for next year, check out the N.Y. Times article “Top Seeds can often mislead in NCAA bracket.”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980) .
Do you need a gift for that special someone? Are you interested in being one of the first to own a rare, handcrafted necklace? If so, Lisa Jacobson (my girlfriend) has some amazing pieces you should check out. On her Elle Jae website (click here), you can view and purchase her latest cutting-edge designs. Take a peek!
Robert Laszewski is the president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates. According to their website, the company is:
“A policy and market place consulting firm specializing in assisting its clients through the significant health policy and market change afoot. Clients include health insurance companies, casualty insurance companies, HMOs, Blue Cross organizations, hospitals, and physician groups.”
In December of last year, Mr. Laszewski decided to enter the blog-o-sphere. His Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review gives interesting commentary regarding contemporary health care and public policy issues.
While I was in New York I saw the Bodies exhibition. The exhibition gives a complete tour of the human anatomy using real human specimens. While most information provided in the exhibit could be found in an anatomy textbook, it is very revealing to see how the body operates first-hand. The exhibit not only looks entire human specimens but also displays a variety of human organs and body parts as well as entire systems (circulatory, digestive, etc.). Normal and abnormal body parts are compared side by side. For individuals (like myself) who have not attended medical school, the exhibit is illuminating.
You can not learn how to play baseball, by simply reading a book; you need to practice. Similarly, reading a basic anatomy book is helpful to understanding the human body, but examining real human specimens gives a person further insight into the body’s amazing inner-workings which work to keep each of us alive. I highly recommend the exhibit.
Knowledge is power. Medical care is a product in which individuals offer patients compensate doctors according to their expertise in the health care field. One way to help sick individuals—especially in developing countries—is to increase their own knowledge of the illnesses which afflict them.
One organization working to spread health care knowledge is Global-HELP. The organization publishes and translates medical guides for various ailments and makes the information available to the public free of charge. This non-profit is similar to the more widely known Hesperian Foundation, of whom I mentioned in my April 8th post. The Global-HELP website describes itself as follows:
“The Global-HELP Organization, commonly referred to as HELP (Health Education using Low-cost Publications), is devoted to making knowledge about health-care accessible worldwide. By using a network of donors, authors, producers, health-care workers, and volunteers, our publications can be made available without charge.
Thanks to advances in software and communication, we can now make these publications available to places and people throughout the world.
All of our publications may be downloaded in PDF format from this website, and printed versions of select publications are also available. When used in developing countries, we provide printed publications for only the cost of mailing. For developed countries, printed publications may be purchased at a reasonable price.
Global-HELP is a humanitarian organization that is non-political and values racial, cultural, and religious diversity.”
Here are some inspirational quotations for some motivation at the beginning of your week.
“The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.”
—Lee Iacocca
“Success comes to the person who does today what you were thinking about doing tomorrow.”
—Unknown
Here’s an article from The Onion which will bring some levity to your Friday. “According to The Economist…“
Marshall Jevon’s ‘The Bayesian Heresy’ blog ranked Healthcare Economist as the #2 Specialized Economics blog of 2006. Check out Mr. Jevon’s other blog favorites of 2006 here.
I would like to thank all my loyal readers for a great year. In just over 11 months, the Healthcare Economist blog has greatly expanded and now attracts over 500 visits (and over 2000 hits) per day. People from all over the world read this blog. The national readership list includes the following countries:
Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gambia, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Guam (USA), Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United States, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe.
Beginning on Sunday, I will be going on vacation to Playa del Carmen in Mexico until January. I wish all my readers a happy and healthy new year. Hasta pronto!
The Economist magazine has posted its Books of the year list for 2006.
A touching and compelling story about tuberculosis in the United States can be found in last Sunday’s Washington Post (”Quarantined“). The mother of the author spent 114 days in the Glenn Dale Hospital, which during the 1950s functioned as a sanatorium for people with TB.
The article states that 2 million people die from tuberculosis each year—mostly in developing countries—and about one third of the world’s population is infected with the disease.
This week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review is posted at MSSPNexus.
A recent Economist article (see a reprint at the Librarian’s Place blog) chronicles the career of Mena Trott. Mrs. Trott (along with her husband) founded Six Apart, a company whose blogging enterprises include Typepad, Movable Type and Live Journal. The most recent and perhaps most profound innovation by the couple at Six Apart is the blogging software named Vox. Mrs. Trott has her own blog on Vox, appropriately named VoxTrott. The most significant advance Vox makes is the following:
“It is intimate. For every item on Vox—a text paragraph, a photo, a link—bloggers can determine if it is to be public or private and, if it is private, exactly who can see it. Ms Trott, for instance, keeps one part of VoxTrott for communicating only with her mother, who has an insatiable appetite for information about certain minutiae of Ms Trott’s life. She also has a daily “Yay Me Updateâ€? just for herself, in which she uploads self-portraits from her mobile phone in order to preserve a chronicle of her life for her descendants—uninterrupted except for that time when she gained a bit more weight than she cared to commit to memory and conveniently forgot to post for a few days.“
While I have not tried to use this software—and it seems unsuitable for professional purposes—the variable level of privacy will be a significant advance for the blog-o-sphere.
The Cavalcade of Risk (#14) is now posted by Micheal Cannon on the Cato-at-Liberty website.
Getting more done in less time is the key to a productive day. Working efficiently is important for not just graduate students, but anyone who has to manage many tasks at once. The “All-but-dissertation Survival Guide” gives a few good pointers.
Five Secrets to Add More Time to your Day, by Carrie Silver-Stock, MSW, LCSW Have you ever met someone who seemed to have an incredible ability to maximize her time? Someone who seemed like he had 36 hours in his day? Are they super human? Or, have they figured out a secret way to add hours to their day? By making a few small changes in your daily routine, you too can begin to feel like you’ve added more time to every day. Here are a few ways to get started.
1) Prioritize:
To begin the process of adding more time to your day, you will want to ask yourself a few important questions.
1) What are my real priorities for the day or the week?
2) Where does my time go now?
3) Is my time currently being spent on the priorities I’ve listed at number one?
4) What is really important for me to accomplish and what is just busy work?
5) Finally, where do I really want my time to go?
2) Schedule Important Events:
After you’ve answered these questions for yourself, schedule the important events or activities that are a priority for you. For example, if you have decided that physical fitness is a priority, when are you going to fit in the four weekly workouts? If the dissertation is a priority (and I would think so!) what dates will you set as deadlines for each of the steps toward completion of the dissertation? Without writing down when you are going to work on something, the tendency is to push those tasks to the wayside.
3) Minimize Distractions:
Too often when we are preparing to complete a project, small and large distractions tend to take us off course. It can be as simple as the temptation to check our email, talk to friends, or answer the phone. Try to create a space where you can minimize your distractions. Close your office door for 30 minutes. Send all your phone messages to voicemail, or plan on checking your email only at three set times a day.
4) Energize:
Sometimes a feeling of low energy can zap us of any desire to get tasks done. There are a few simple things you can do to enliven your day.
1) Take a look at what time of day you work best. Are you a morning person or an evening person? Capitalize on your best work times.
2) Don’t forget to eat breakfast. According to Bonnie Spring, Ph.D., eating breakfast can prevent many of the adverse effects of fasting, such as irritability and fatigue.
3) Add a little exercise to your day. If you aren’t one to exercise for 20-30 minutes a day, getting up to stretch or simply adding a 10-15 minute walk during your day may give you that boost you need.
4) Don’t forget to drink more water. Many studies have shown that simply being dehydrated can cause fatigue and dull your critical thinking abilities.
5) Ask for Help:
Asking for help can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s easy to overlook how a task can be divided up or delegated to other co-workers or members of the family. Another strategy can be to hire help. Maybe budgeting a little extra money for a babysitter or a cleaning service could be well worth your money, depending on the value of your time.
With some creative thought and effort, you really can find the extra time you need to finish your dissertation and still have time for your life. Try these five steps–You may become the one in whom your friends stand in awe as you make more room in your day!
Time for a day of family, turkey, and of course football. Enjoy!
The latest version of the Cavalcade of Risk is posted at RDoctor Medical.
On a lighter note…
If you are a fan of NBC’s “The Office” and need a laugh, please take a look at the following clip on YouTube. In this video from season one, Dwight Schrute (played by Rainn Wilson) is put in charge of choosing a health insurance plan for his co-workers.
If you are sick and tired of reading health care blogs, you may want to look at a blog which looks at the health of the environment. Natural Capital is an environment economics blog by Robert Metcalfe, a PhD student at Imperial College London’s Tanaka Business School. A visitor will even find an entertaining cartoon regarding grad student life.
In January of this year, I wrote (”Does drinking wine truly increase longevity“) that I was doubtful that wine has a large impact on longevity. As a dedicated social scientist, I have decided not to simply accept the findings of other experts, but instead to do some of my own empirical research. Monday and Tuesday I will be in Santa Barbara with my girlfriend to sample a variety of this nation’s finest wines. Healthcare Economist will return on Wednesday.
Healthcare Economist. Why not Health Care Economist? Or Health-care Economist? Which one is correct?
The Chicago Manual of Style webpage offers a discussion of the issue. The site claims that ‘health care’ is the correct spelling according to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition. One individual, however, writes to the website saying:
“I find in my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (my favorite) that healthcare, without the hyphen, is the second spelling for the noun form of the word. Health care and health-care are listed as the spellings for the adjectival form of the word.”
Although it seems that ‘Health Care Economist’ may be more grammatically correct since I use the word as an adjective, I am going to rebel from the status quo and stick with Healthcare Economist. My apologies to grammar experts everywhere.
On August 29th, 2006 there will be a book forum discussing The Crisis of Abundance by Arnold Kling. While I have not yet read this book, I do respect Mr. Kling’s work and am anxious to see him discuss his views in this type of setting. The book made the top 10 list of the National Chamber Foundation (the educational arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). Also attending the forum will be Michael Cannon, director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute; Jason Furman, a Visiting Scholar at NYU; and Sebastian Mallaby, Editorial Writer and Columnist for the Washington Post. For those not in Washington, D.C. area, the conference will be available online as well.Â
The conference takes place on August 29th at noon ET.  For more specifics, click here.
Below is an excerpt from chapter one of Crisis of Abundance:
My guess is that 30 years ago, a patient with similar symptoms would have been treated “empirically,� a term doctors use to describe a situation for which they do not have a precise diagnosis and treatment, so that instead they must use guesswork. A layman’s synonym for treated empirically would be “trial and error.� In this case, the patient might have been sent home with an antibiotic and perhaps a prescription for Prednisone, a steroid used to reduce inflammation. There would have been nothing else to do. In 1975, computerized medical imaging technology was new and exotic, with limited applications.
In contrast, in 2005, over the course of a few days Quixote was given a computed tomography (CT) scan, referred to a specialist, sent to a different hospital, referred to a specialty clinic, seen by a battery of specialists there, and given yet another CT scan. Ultimately, however, she was sent home, as she might have been 30 years ago, with an antibiotic, Prednisone, and no firm diagnosis.
Compared with 30 years ago, Quixote received more services, in the form of specialist consultations and high-tech diagnostics. However, the ultimate treatment and outcome were no different. This does not mean that medicine is no better today than it was a generation ago. The CT scans and specialist consultations could have turned out differently. They might have been critically important, depending on her actual condition. Under some circumstances, treating Quixote empirically with an antibiotic and Prednisone could have been a mistake, perhaps costing some or all of her sight in one eye.
Such is modern medicine in the United States. Doctors are able to take extra precautions. They can use more specialized knowledge and better technology to try to pin down the diagnosis. They can perform tests to rule out improbable but dangerous conditions. But only in a minority of cases does the outcome deviate from what would have been the case 30 years ago.
An interview with Arnold Kling is also available at TCS Daily (”To much of a good thing?“).
The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review has been posted at Matthew Holt’s The Health Care Blog.
To prove that economists are not always dull and sometimes have a sense of humor, I submit the following: DB’s Medical Rants has an entertaining cartoon on physician conflict of interest.
Do you need more exposure for your health policy blog? Do you have valuable insights on health policy that you believe the public needs to hear?  If so, here is the perfect avenue for you…
Healthcare Economist will be the host the Health Wonk Review #11. The Health Wonk Review is “the best of the best”: the best blog postings from the brightest health policy minds on the web!  Please submit your posts through The Medical Blog Network (TMBN) or email me directly. Submissions are due by Wednesday, July 12th at 9am EST.
To submit your posts through the TMBN website: click here.
If you wish to email your post of choice, please send an email to (jason.shafrin@gmail.com)Â with the following information:
- Your Name and Email Address
- The Name of your website and its web address
- The title of your post
- The web address of your post
- A brief (2-3 line) summary of its contents
The Healthcare Economist is going on vacation to his hometown of Milwaukee. Posts will resume next week.
Health Wonk Review #9 is posted at the Workers’ Comp Insider blog.Â
Today begins the biggest event in sports. No, I am not talking about the NBA finals (although the Dallas Mavericks did win game one); I am speaking of the World Cup 2006 and it begins at 9am today in Germany. The schedule gives us 29 consecutive days of futbol. If you think that soccer is just a game, consider this: warring factions in The Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) recently declared a ceasefire because their national team had qualified for the World Cup for the first time.Â
Number-one ranked Brazil is the favorite, but I believe that it will be Argentina who becomes the first non-European team to win a World Cup held on European soil. The Americans are currently ranked number 5 in the world, but are playing in el grupo de la muerte (group of death) along with Italy, the Czech Republic and Ghana. In 2002, the United States surprised the world with a quarterfinal finish and hope to duplicate their success in Germany. Spain fields a talent-laden squad but has a history of disappointing finishes in the World Cup.
At 9am (Pacific Time), the tournament will begin with host Germany facing off against Costa Rica. The US plays on at 9am on June 12th, noon on June 17th, and 7am on June 21st.Â
To lighten your mood…
A traveller wandering on an island inhabited entirely by cannibals comes upon a butcher shop. This shop specialised in human brains differentiated according to source. The sign in the shop read:
Artists’ Brains $9/lb Philosophers’ Brains $12/lb Scientists’ Brains $15/lb Economists’ Brains $19/lb
Upon reading the sign, the traveller noted, “My those economists’ brains must be popular!” To which the butcher replied, “Are you kidding! Do you have any idea how many economists you have to kill to get a pound of brains?!”
And one more…
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
For more economist jokes, check out the OXymoron website.
Health Wonk Review #7 is available at InsureBlog.
I just finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, a very entertaining novel about the maturation of a boy who grew up in Afghanistan and later emigrated to the United States. In the book, there is a wonderful passage where the protagonist’s father lectures him on morality. His speech is one with which most libertarian-oriented economists would certainly agree.
“Now, no matter what the mullah teachers, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?”
“…When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said. “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness, do you see?”
“…If there’s a God out there, then I would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.”
The book is a quick read, but one that also has the ability to touch your heart.
When economists talk of improved healthcare, they are generally speaking of technological improvement or increased efficiency in the production of medical care. When most people talk about better healthcare, “better healthcare” means more medical services for free. The Angry Economist rants regarding the ’something-for-nothing’ attitude of the general public.
The very existance of that phrase ["better health care"] points to an effort to turn Health Care from an economic good into a political good. That is, one which cannot be purchased, but which is available (at some level of quality and supply) to everyone.
Ponder this: have you ever heard of a Campaign for Better Hot Dogs? Or the Better Blue Jeans Taskforce? No, of course not, because those are economic goods are supplied via markets. There are many different amounts, kinds, and prices of these goods available to purchasers. Some of these are markedly poor quality, yet they are purchased anyway.
The May 4th Health Wonk Review has been posted on Joe Paduda’s Managed Care Matters site.
Who says MBA students don’t learn anything? Check out this video where Columbia MBA students parody Federal Reserve Chairmen Ben Bernanke. It is pretty entertaining.
Not everyone is like me and enjoys employing the discipline of economics in their research. On the Gendergeek blog, the author claims in her Geek-onomics post that:
It worries me that so much of the heavily gendered distortions of modern economics, in conjunction with its methodological fetishism, is unnoticed or ignored. Economics could turn out to be the new morality and it needs to be exposed for what it really is: a male chauvinist pig of a discipline, suffering from severe monomania. In Freakonomics, its flawed methods are pointlessly applied to “everything� resulting in an agreeable, but ultimately meaningless encounter. It deserves to sell (I guess) but not to be taken so seriously.
Yesterday was the NFL Draft. It is a day of hope where teams can look to their future and see a potential Pro-Bowl individual joining their cadre of players. For instance my favorite team, the Green Bay Packers, selected linebacker A.J. Hawk from Ohio State University. The team was considering trading their number 5 pick and multiple other draft picks for the No. 2 pick to select Reggie Bush from USC. Would this have been a wise choice?
A recent 2005 working paper by Cade Massey and Richard Thaler suggest that teams are overconfident in their ability to predict the sucess of a given player in the draft. They hypothesize that teams who trade picks to move up in the draft ‘overpay’ for the value they receive. To quote the article:
“Our findings suggest the biases we had anticipated are actually even stronger than we had guessed. We expected to find that early picks were overpriced, and that the surplus values of picks would decline less steeply than the market values. Instead we have found that the surplus value of the picks during the first round actually increases throughout the round: the players selected with the final pick in the first round on average produces more surplus to his team than than the first pick, and costs one quarter the price!
“Our modest claim in this paper is that the owners and managers of National Football League teams are also human, and that market forces have not been strong enough to overcome these human
failings.”
Massey and Thaler believe that the excessive self-confidence can also be applied to physicians.
“…even professionals who are highly skilled and knowledgeable in their area of expertise are not necessarily experts at making good judgments and decisions. Numerous studies find, for example, that physicians, among the most educated professionals in our society, make diagnoses that display overconfidence and violate Bayes’ rule (cf. Christensen-Szalanski & Bushyhead, 1981; Eddy, 1982). The point, of course, is that physicians are experts at medicine, not necessarily probabilistic reasoning. And it should not be surprising that when faced with difficult problems, such as inferring the probability that a patient has cancer from a given test, physicians will be prone to the same types of errors that subjects display in the laboratory. Such findings reveal only that physicians are
human.”
Kate Steadman’s Healthy Policy blog is hosting the Health Wonk Review #3 for this week. The HWR distills two weeks of health policy blogging to bring readers the best of the best. Topics include:
- Reform: What’s the definition of “is� edition
- Changes are A’ Comin
- Medicine and Health Policy
- From the Unbeaten Health Blogosphere Path
- To close the show…
I made my debut in the Health Wonk review with an article on Baumol’s Cost Disease.
The NCAA Men’s basketball tournament is almost upon us. Time to fill out your brackets and cheer for your favorite teams. I have filled out my bracket, but as an economist, I can’t do this as any normal person would. I have used some quantitiative measures in order to rank the teams. The teams are ranked according the to the JRI (Jason Ratings Index):
- JRI=(AMV) *log(200-SOS)
AMV is the ‘Average Margin of Victory’ for each team and SOS is the team’s Strength of Schedule ranking according to the RPI index. Any team with a strength of schedule below 199 (see George Washington) I predict to lose. Here are my top ten teams in the tournament with the JRI in parenthesis:
- Texas (35.1)
- UConn (34.7)
- Memphis (33.6)
- Duke (31.0)
- Florida (30.6)
- Kansas (30.1)
- Villanova (26.5)
- UNC (26.2)
- Illinois (26.0)
- Washington (25.8)
My predicted final four is Texas, UConn, Memphis, and Florida. I have picked Texas over UConn in the finals. My upset specials (which are predicted by the JRI) are that Nevada and Xavier will get to the sweet sixteen.
Despite these quantitative predictions, I would love it if Penn, Marquette, Wisconsin, or UW-Milwaukee made it to the final four. Go Quakers!
I would like to thank Joseph Paduda for his kind words on March 2nd. Principal of Health Strategy Associates, Mr. Paduda cited my Medicare timeline and stated:
“Jason Shafrin at Healthcare-Economist.com has provided a brief timeline of the development of Medicare in the US.
Jason’s blog is quite good; heavy on the policy side (no surprise there) with several excellent summaries of data-rich topics such as price elasticity of employer-based health insurance.
I recommend it to fellow policy wonks.”
DB’s Medical Rants blog has a variety of entertaing medical cartoons. Enjoy!
This Sunday, the San Diego Union Tribune (”A wealth of talent“) wrote a complimentary article regarding the ascendancy of UCSD’s Economics department into the elite strata of economics departments. Last year, U.S. News and World Report ranked the UCSD economics department #10 in the nation. As a graduate student in UCSD’s economics department, my ‘unbiased’ opinion is that the article is right on target. The Bengt Holmstrom, chairman of the the top-ranked MIT economics department said the following:
“They are like a small-market baseball team that doesn’t have the advantages of a Red Sox or Yankees, but still does well. They deserve a lot of credit because they can’t just pick and choose whoever they want.â€?
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