The last time I talked about health care economics was a mere couple weeks into the lifespan of this blog. In that post, I noticed that Medicare’s costs, while increasing, have increased at a much slower pace than private insurance costs in the United States. Then, today, I ran across this study from Leighton Ku and Matthew Broaddus and learned that it’s not Medicare that should serve as the poster boy of the potential benefits of a “government takeover of healthcare”, it’s Medicaid and SCHIP. Let me show you. Continue reading “The Awesome Efficiency of Medicaid”
Tag: Health
British Horse Hystericism
In the course of my trip (which I have been on since the 6th and will continue to be on until the 17th–blog posting, in the meantime, is consequently limited and intermittent), I have found myself watching news on television. This is something I do rarely, in no small part because TV news tends to be both repetitive and devoid of intellectual content. Very nearly every time I have turned on the news, whether it be the BBC or Sky, the story invariably has been about the fact that recently, there was some horse meat found in meat that was purported to be from cattle, not horses. The more I hear about this story, the more irrelevant it seems to me to be. Here’s why.
Distribution of Health
An interesting topic arose in one of my seminars today–given a scarce amount of health resources, how do we determine whom we provide care to and whom we do not? Forget for a moment the distribution of wealth, what about the distribution of health? I would like to give my answer to that question today.
Mental Health: Parents vs. Professionals
In recent days, much has been said of the need to bolster the quality of mental health care in America, given that the recent mass shooters have, for the most part, been victims of mental illness. While such a policy cannot be a substitute for controlling the weapons that, statistically, lead directly to violence, it is nonetheless very much the case that improving our collective mental health would also be helpful, not only in reducing the number of violent incidents, but in improving the quality of life for the millions afflicted with the wide array of mental disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. How might such an improvement begin to be made?
Libertarian Party Platform
Some of the reaction to yesterday’s post, “Intellectual Hipsters: Libertarians” made the argument that yes, libertarianism has many defects in its theoretical intellectual foundation, but that perhaps real world libertarians are not deriving their policies strictly from that foundation, or that the policies of the Libertarian Party in America remain useful for other, non-libertarian reasons. I agree that this is a proposition worth considering, and so this post exists as a companion piece to yesterday’s–examining libertarian policy in practise to go along with yesterdays’ examination of libertarian political theory.
Benjamin Studebaker 