At the Health Affairs blog, Sarah Dine affects mystification at the failure of this year’s SCHIP expansion effort:
The failure to reauthorize a SCHIP program that allows states to continue the flexibility represented by the Republican frontrunners’ home states and indeed many of the fifty states remains one of the great political mysteries of the year.
Despite […]
When dealing with the problem of medical overtreatment, ”progressive” policy wonks always manage to tiptoe around the elephant in the room: malpactice abuse.
A typical example of this phenomenon can be found at Economist’s View. In a post about Shannon Brownlee’s book, Overtreated, Mark Thoma insinuates that the overtreatment problem is caused by greed:
Essentially, the argument is that profit maximization […]
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw offers some useful observations on the zealotry with which ”progressive” health care wonks push insurance mandates:
Some analysts, when discussing health reform plans, make a big deal over the issue of insurance mandates. They suggest that it is crucial to have mandates to solve the adverse selection problem and that plans without mandates will not work.
But Mankiw, […]
Last week, Shakespeare’s axiom about brevity being the soul of wit was once again proven correct. In the Bard’s idiom, the word “wit” meant “sagacity,” and that quality is plentiful in GruntDoc’s six-word post on health care reform:
Price, Quality, Access ……………….. Pick any two.
That pretty much sums up the central dilemma of health care reform. No matter how much BS is promulgated […]
Great Britain’s socialized medical system rations care by restricting patient access to providers and state-of-the-art treatment. The NHS uses a variety of tactics to accomplish this, including the refusal to pay for some highly effective cancer drugs.
Some NHS patients have responded to this egregious policy by offering to pay for the needed drugs out of their own pockets. Incredibly, the NHS won’t allow […]
Yaron Brook and Keith Lockitch, of the Ayn Rand Institute, have written an op-ed which debunks the myth that “market failure” has caused American health care’s problems and explains why statist “reform” proposals won’t cure the system’s primary ailment:
These proposals cannot and will not cure our ailing medical system because they misdiagnose the disease: It is not the free market that has caused […]
An important article of faith among single-payer advocates is the notion that the free market doesn’t work for health care because of a phenomenon known as information asymmetry. A typical expression of this precept can be found in Maggie Mahar’s response to a comment I recently made on her blog:
The health care market is different from other markets because […]
Jason Shafrin at Healthcare Economist links to a study that attempts to quantify the relationship between drug importation and pharmaceutical innovation. The study’s author, Frank R. Lichtenberg, concludes that importation would bring about short term price reductions but that innovation would suffer:
In the long run, a 10% decline in drug prices would … be likely to cause at least […]
I’m sure I’ll (once again) incur the wrath of the “paulbearers” for highlighting the following segment from Ron Paul’s writings, but I was simply unable to pass it up. The Houston Chronicle provides a number of “interesting” quotes from the good doctor’s book, Freedom Under Seige, including this:
Paul also singled out people with AIDS, saying they “demand health care and […]
President Bush has repeatedly said that he will veto any SCHIP expansion bill that fails to put low-income children first and relies on a tobacco tax for funding. Congressional Democrats nonetheless sent him another one that failed both tests, and he kept his promise:
In a statement notifying Congress of his decision [to veto the legislation], Bush said the bill was […]
