Chinese Repression Threatens Economic Dynamism and Political Stability
BEIJING—China’s capital looks like an American big city. Tall office buildings. Large shopping malls. Squat government offices. Horrid traffic jams.
The casual summer uniform is the same: shorts, athletic shoes, skirts, t-shirts, sandals, blouses. Even an occasional baseball cap.
It is a country which the Communist revolutionaries who ruled only four decades ago would not recognize. True believers still exist. One spoke to me reverently of Mao’s rise to power and service to the Chinese people. However, she is the exception, at least among China’s younger professionals.
Indeed, younger educated Chinese could not be ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 27, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Doug Bandow Source Type: blogs
Health Spending: The $2 Trillion Question—Or Questions
Editor’s note: This is one of several posts Health Affairs Blog will publish stemming from sessions at the June 2015 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting (ARM) in Minneapolis. Watch Health Affairs Blog for additional posts on topics raised at the ARM.
Author’s note: This post was inspired by an ARM session that I had the privilege of moderating. The policy roundtable included Melinda Buntin and David Stevenson of Vanderbilt University, discussing work they’ve done primarily under a grant with the Commonwealth Fund, and Michael Chernew of Harvard University, discussing work he’s done with Zack Cooper of Yale Univer...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - July 24, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Stuart Guterman Tags: Costs and Spending Featured Medicaid and CHIP Medicare Academy Health GDP health spending IOM NHE Stuart Guterman Source Type: blogs
Science Revives “The Hiatus”
Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
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Just five weeks after Science magazine prominently featured a paper proclaiming that the multidecadal slowdown in the rate of the earth’s average temperature rise—aka, the “pause” or “hiatus”—was but a figment of bad data, comes a new paper in Science magazine explaining the physical mechanisms that have led to the slowdown.
Wait, what?
You re...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 9, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger Source Type: blogs
Missing the Point on Refugees and Welfare
Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) criticized a piece I wrote for The Hill in which I called for the U.S. to accept more refugees. Costa took issue for my argument to limit their access to welfare once they arrive, which I wrote in the eighteenth paragraph of my piece. Conservatives criticized me for not mentioning welfare reform sooner in my piece. I wrote about allowing more refugees in for the first seventeen paragraphs of my piece because that is more important than denying them welfare.
Costa, however, stooped pretty low when he wrote: “[H]opefully refugees in America will never be forced to s...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 2, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Alex Nowrasteh Source Type: blogs
Six Problems With The ACA That Aren’t Going Away
As Congress and the Obama Administration await the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell, there is heightened interest in what happens after the decision. One common assumption is that if the court rules in favor of the administration, there will be no need to make any major changes in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This assumption is wrong.
There is an urgent need to make major changes in the law regardless of how the Supreme Court rules. These are changes that will require bi-partisan cooperation — something that is rare in health policy.
The changes are needed because there are at least six major problems ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - June 25, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: John Goodman Tags: Costs and Spending Following the ACA Insurance and Coverage Medicare employer coverage GDP global budgets individual mandate Medicare Advantage premium subsidies Source Type: blogs
Moneyball For Doctors and Nurses (and the People Who Run Hospitals)
By PAUL KECKLEY
Michael Lewis’ 2003 best seller Moneyball recounts how Oakland Athletics’ manager Billy Beane beat the big-payroll odds in major league baseball by using analytics to field a competitive team. The dynamic between Beane and his Yale-trained geek, Peter Brand is the central theme: together they fought off naysayers using Brand’s sabermetrics model later credited with the Red Sox World Series win the next season.
This week, thousands of financial officers from across multiple sectors in healthcare will descend on Orlando for the Healthcare Financial Management Association Annual Institute (A...
Source: The Health Care Blog - June 24, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB CFO Paul Keckley Source Type: blogs
A Look at Some of the Aging Research of Irina Conboy
Irina Conboy is on the SENS Research Foundation's advisory board and is one of the more frequently noted scientists presently working on heterochronic parabiosis and related research. These scientific programs aim at identifying age-related changes in important signal proteins circulating in the bloodstream, with parabiosis being where it all starts: link the circulatory systems of an old and a young animal and observe benefits to measures of health in the elder of the two. This happens because old tissues are exposed to a young blood environment. Once specific proteins in the blood are identified as being of interest, the...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 10, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
Promoting Transparency And Clear Choices In Health Care
A funny thing is happening at the intersection of culture and health, and it’s spilling over into politics and policy — a vigorous demand for transparency in health care.
Various forces are driving this demand. Even amid the current “slowdown” in national health expenditures—spending and premiums experienced record low growth in 2013—household costs have continued to grow two to three times faster than real incomes. Looking forward, health spending as a share of GDP will grow more rapidly over the next ten years than it did in either of the preceding two decades.
Growing Costs For Consum...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - June 9, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Joel White Tags: Costs and Spending Health IT Organization and Delivery Population Health big data HIPAA performance measures transparency Source Type: blogs
Ten Things Every Economist Should Know about the Gold Standard
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (well, OK–at the risk of continuing to sound like a broken record), I’d like to say a bit more about economists’ tendency to get their monetary history wrong. In particular, I’d like to take aim at common myths about the gold standard.
If there’s one monetary history topic that tends to get handled especially sloppily by monetary economists, not to mention other sorts, this is it. Sure, the gold standard was hardly perfect, and gold bugs themselves sometimes make silly claims about their favorite former monetary standard. But these things don’t excuse the errors many...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 4, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: George Selgin Source Type: blogs
As Employers Try To Avoid The Cadillac Tax, Treasury And The IRS Need To Act
When Congress passed the ACA, the law’s so-called Cadillac tax was touted as targeting lavish health plans, supposedly rare but costly. However, the economic reality today is that the excise tax will hurt everyday workers and the health benefits they have come to rely on.
Employers are actively trying to develop ways to avoid the non-deductible 40 percent tax on employer-sponsored plans valued over $10,200 for individual coverage and $27,500 for family coverage, set to take effect in 2018. But in the process, those employers have begun to impose higher health costs on workers. The time for policymakers and regulators to ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - May 12, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Jorge Castro Tags: Following the ACA Insurance and Coverage Cadillac tax Employer-Sponsored Insurance Excise tax health care IRS Source Type: blogs
The Fed and the Recovery, or, QE not D
George Selgin
Lately more and more people seem inclined to congratulate the Fed for the great job it has done saving us from another Great Depression and getting the U.S. economy back on its feet. Frankly, I’m getting tired of it.
It’s not that I’m cock-sure that the Fed’s post-2008 actions haven’t achieved anything. It’s just that I’m pretty darn sure that all the people who claim that the Fed has done a bang-up job haven’t any solid reasons for doing so. They remind me of the characters in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies who were certain that Granny had a concoction that could cure the common cold...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 3, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: George Selgin Source Type: blogs
Disagreement over Chile's National School Choice Program
Andrew J. Coulson
A week ago, the Atlanta Journal Constitution published an on-line op-ed critiquing Chile’s nationwide public-and-private school choice program. In a letter to the editor, I objected to several of the op-ed’s central claims. The authors responded, and the AJC has now published the entire exchange. A follow-up is warranted, which I offer here:
Comment on the Gaete, Jones response to my critique:
Their response consists chiefly of “moving the goalposts”—changing the issue under debate rather than responding to the critique of the original point. The first claim in their original op-ed to which I o...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 30, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Andrew J. Coulson Source Type: blogs
The "Aging Kills" Initiative
A number of the efforts undertaken by the ever industrious Alex Zhavoronkov of InSilico Medicine involve reaching out into new communities to educate and raise awareness on the need for longevity science and the prospects for developing the means to treat aging. He was presenting at a computing hardware conference recently, for example, talking about the path to greater healthy life spans to people who have probably never given the subject much thought. In advocacy experimentation is always necessary: success is obvious in hindsight, but you never really know where you are going to find significant new support for the caus...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 24, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
What Is Behind The Post-Recession Bend In The Health Care Cost Curve?
It has been a while since I last had the opportunity to analyze the slowdown in health spending and the extent to which it represents a lasting bend in the cost curve, as opposed to lingering effects of the “Great Recession or other temporary changes.” (See Note 1)
Distinguishing Health Care Cost Curves
When we discuss bending the health care cost curve, two questions arise: “Which curve?” and “Short run or long run?” In this post, I focus on the curve represented by the growth rate in national health expenditures (NHE) pre- and post-recession. Other curves of interest include “excess growth” (health spendi...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - March 23, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Charles Roehrig Tags: All Categories Consumers Dental Care Health Care Costs Health Care Delivery Health Reform Hospitals Medicare Payment Pharma Physicians Public Health Spending Source Type: blogs
