Category Health economics
Meetings with Meaning
As we all head into academic conference season, here is some food for thought with a guest post by Steve Morgan. Enjoy. Livio.
Drugs heal, drugs hurt.
There are those who use drugs, and there are those who could, potentially, benefit from drugs. The two groups do not always coincide:
Ontario and its Physicians: Richer Than They Think No Longer
Ontario’s health minister Deb Matthews is moving into a major battle with the physicians in the process of trying to get health care costs under control as part of the provincial deficit fighting agenda. Deb Matthews has on a number of occasions remarked that Ontario’s physicians are the best paid in the country.
Is a Constitutional Challenge Public Health Care’s Next Arena?
Many Canadians believe that the Canada Health Act is the bulwark that is supposed to be protecting public health care and that it should ensure comparable levels of coverage across the country. Yet, if one examines per capita provincial government health spending, the evidence shows that there are major differences.
Dealing with the Baby Boom: You Only Die Once
It has been a week of immersion in health economics for me. Last Friday, we had Herb Emery from Calgary visiting Lakehead and he gave a seminar presentation on generational balance and public health care spending in Canada. I also just got back from a workshop on health expenditure forecasting and along with last Friday’s […]
Stein’s Law and Canadian Health Spending
Health economist Uwe Reinhardt in a recent Economix Blog posting noted the recent rates of U.S. health spending growth for 2009 and 2010 reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were marked as the lowest rate in the 51-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts. Indeed, the growth rate for 2009 was […]
The cruel consequences of moral hazard in health care
Our health care system devotes too many resources to prolonging life, and too few to improving its quality. A case described by Lisa Sanders vividly illustrates what I have in mind: A couple of years earlier she started “walking like a drunk,” [the patient] told the slender, middle-aged doctor. Her legs were weak and her […]
Pigou and Paternalism
Here is a question from the final exam for my public finance course: A typical person’s demand for potato chips is given by p=5-q where q=the number of packages of chips purchased, and p is the price of chips in dollars per package. The marginal cost of producing potato chips is $1 per package. The […]
Could periodontal competition make root canals more expensive?
On the right, the evil representative of the dental industry, seeking to maintain dentists' monopoly on the provision of all dental services. On the left, the noble entrepreneur, who only wishes to make the world a brighter place by providing safe, affordable teeth-whitening services. This image is taken from a video created by the libertarian […]
What is actuarially fair insurance?
Actuarially fair insurance has an expected net pay-off of zero. From a consumer's point of view, an insurance contract is actuarially fair if the premiums paid are equal to the expected value of the compensation received. This expected value is, in turn, defined as the probability of the insured-against event occurring multiplied by the compensation […]
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