health care

What Market Design Can Do for You

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 …

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Health Care: End Third-party Payer, or Stop Wasting My Time and Money

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 …

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Melissa Thomasson on This American Life on Health Insurance

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 …

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Choice and Competition Protect Consumers of Healthcare … and Electricity

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 …

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Health Care Policy, Individual Consumption Portfolios, and Liberty

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 …

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Health Care Policy

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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