Michael Giberson Medicare pays medical equipment suppliers based on indexed-adjustments to a price list established 25 years ago. It is extremely unlikely that these prices are efficient. For the past 10 years Medicare has explored the possibility of pricing medical equipment via procurement auctions. Their procurement auction plan is fatally flawed. What can market design …
Lynne Kiesling I noticed recently that Steve Levitt opined briefly on the health care bill in ways that are consistent with my earlier argument that unless Congress tackled the third-party payer problem head on they would be wasting our time and money. In his Freakonomics post, Levitt recommends Gary Becker’s analysis to us: In Becker’s …
Lynne Kiesling I continue to be thoroughly disgusted by the disingenuousness of the health care policy debate in Washington. From a public choice perspective I understand why the debate continues to focus on what I think are the tangential and ancillary questions, and the attempts to tweak and improvise around the edges … but my …
Health Care: End Third-party Payer, or Stop Wasting My Time and Money Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Another reason I’ve been staying away from the computer over the holidays is that between the Senate health care bill process, the futilely constructivist quest for government policy to stimulate the economy, proposals for financial regulation, and the craven stupidity of TSA policy proposals after the Christmas day bomb failure, I am fed …
Lynne Kiesling The NPR Planet Money folks do a great job of communicating complicated economic ideas with more nuance and sophistication than any other media folks around. The most recent episode of This American Life is an outstanding example: 392: Someone Else’s Money This week, we bring you a deeper look inside the health insurance …
Melissa Thomasson on This American Life on Health Insurance Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Matt Welch does a sharp and thorough textual exegesis of parts of President Obama’s speech to Congress on healthcare (health care?) last night, in his article on the accusations of lying that are flying around Washington these days. Matt’s final paragraph struck me, not just because I think he (and President Obama, in …
Choice and Competition Protect Consumers of Healthcare … and Electricity Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Two posts I’ve read this morning about health care resonate for me in combination. The first was Russ Roberts’ discussion of his conversation with a new Walmart employee about wages and benefits, where he notes that I didn’t get to ask her if she had health care coverage at either job. But the …
Health Care Policy, Individual Consumption Portfolios, and Liberty Read More »
Lynne Kiesling We don’t write much about health care economics here, but in many respects it does raise some of the same issues that I find fascinating in electricity, telecom, and technology industries. David Zetland has a good post today about how third-party payer health care rules lead to cost increases and overconsumption of health …
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