Claims about what is wrong with U.S. health care have changed little in the last century. Lamenting that “the old neighborhood life has gone and with it the intimate and prolonged personal contacts which made the old relationship between physician and patient simple and easy of attachment,” and that “still more deeply is this relationship [...]Findings: Medicare’s largest effort to pay hospitals based on how they perform — an inspiration for key parts of the health care law — did not lead to fewer deaths, a new study has found. Implications: The study casts doubt on a central premise of the health law’s effort to rework the financial incentives for [...]It’s called the Levenseindekliniek, the “end of life clinic.” It serves as a point of contact for all Dutch people who want to die but don’t have a primary care physician prepared to help them do so. The clinic has mobile euthanasia teams, each of which consists of a doctor and a nurse. When an [...]
I will be at the Economics Bloggers Forum in Kansas City all day today. The Kauffman Foundation will be putting a live stream of the forum from roughly 8:30 AM through 2:30 PM (down during lunch and breaks) on www.growthology.org. I will be making two points, elaborated below the fold. 1. Our long term deficit [...]
A new study suggests credentialed Internet pharmacies sell good-quality medicines most, if not all of the time.The center piece of the Obama administration’s case for an individual health insurance mandate is the argument that people with private insurance pay for care for the uninsured through “cost shifting”—higher prices charged by doctors and hospitals to recover losses from uncompensated care. So how much cost shifting is there? John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard and [...]Only Cardinal isn’t a Columbian drug ring. Its CEO isn’t Pablo Escobar. Like other large distributors, Cardinal has invested heavily in systems to track unusual narcotics-sales patterns. It has hired former DEA agents to staff its oversight group and routinely reports irregular transactions back to DEA. Cardinal is fighting the suspension. But making the cases [...]In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that a Vermont woman who had her hand and forearm amputated because of gangrene after being injected with a brand name antinausea drug could sue the manufacturer for inadequate warning of the risks; she won $6.8 million from Wyeth. In 2011, the court ruled that similar failure-to-warn suits could [...]From a blogger who is ordinarily thoughtful. This is Matt Yglesias at Slate: A lot of people, including former White House spokesman Reid Cherlin, seem to think it’s extremely difficult to explain and defend the core elements of the Affordable Care Act to people…. It’s true that the law covers a lot of ground and [...]Conservatives originated the idea of an individual health insurance mandate and promoted it at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Today, they are running from the idea, however: Intellectual authors of the idea at the Heritage Foundation have filed legal briefs contesting the mandate and have published mea culpas…. There is at least [...]This is Kevin Outterson, writing at The Incidental Economist: If a healthy person doesn’t buy insurance, the average cost of the risk pool goes up. This is unique to insurance markets. If a healthy person doesn’t buy broccoli, the average price goes down. Answer below the fold. If the market is allowed to price risk [...]
[Forbes.com] A month ago, Richard Evans, a veteran pharmaceuticals analyst at the boutique research firm Sovereign & Sector, sounded an alarm that should scare anyone working at a large pharmaceutical company: he predicted that annual price increases would have to either end or be sharply reduced. This could literally do ...
U.S. Soldier Robert Bales is accused of killing 16 civilians in southern Afghanistan. He claims to remember events earlier in the evening and later in the evening but having no memory of supposedly going to villages near his base and carrying out killings. By way of disclosure I will mention that he has hired as [...]
The DSM-5 committee in all its infinite wisdom wants to make grief a medical disorder (you can read more about my experiences with grief here). They are currently proposing to