Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Our data, for example, show that a third of Medicare’s spending in physician or outpatient settings in 2012 reflects technology that did not exist a decade earlier…When it comes to technology development, the central challenge is to encourage high-value innovation while discouraging innovation that drives up costs without much improving health. Bagley, Chandra and Frakt. Correcting Signals for…
HT: Justin Wolfers via The Incidental Economist.
“If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny.” ― Thomas Jefferson “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.” ― Walter Cronkite
Daniel Kahneman explains the false inference many people make between causation and regression to the mean. A well-known example is the “Sports Illustrated jinx,” the claim that an athlete whose picture appears on the cover of the magazine is doomed to perform poorly the following season. Overconfidence and the pressure of meeting high expectations are…
Below are two excerpts from a series of articles in Wilson Quarterly on Prison reform: “With effective programs, we could reduce the number of repeat offenders by nearly 100,000. We could do even better if these efforts were linked to improved services in teh community upon release. Such efforts would pay for themselves by reducing…
“The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail…
“We are not cutting Medicare benefits. We are trying to eliminate waste.” Vice President Joe Biden, 25 February 2010. “Our country’s too big, too complicated, too decentralized for Washington, a few of us here, just to write a few rules about remaking seventeen percent of the economy all at once.” Senator Lamar Alexander, 25 February 2010.…
“It is a sin to judge any man by his post.” St. Augustine
The Economist paraphrasing Nobel laureate Paul Krugman: Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst, said Mr Krugman.
“Adequate credit is to trade what altitude is to aircraft; without it, the odds of coming to grief over preilous commercial terrain are great. All merchant enterprises sooner or later lose cargoes or encounter soft markets. Without ample capital reserves and the ability to borrow at low rates of interest, bankruptcy is inevitable.” ~ William…