The use of emergency rooms for routine care fell, as did hospital admissions for treating preventable conditions, and the proportion of uninsured among hospital inpatients (by 36%), while there was no increase in the growth of hospital costs. From the NBER Digest article summarizing NBER working paper 16012 [ungated version] by Jonathan T. Kolstad and Amanda E. Kowalski:
Category Archives: health care
Joe Lawler and Joe Stiglitz Agree!
Or, on economic costs versus budget costs
From American Spectator, Joe Lawler writes:
“The cost … to the budget, though, is not the only relevant cost.”
PPACA and “What If?” Scenarios
Or, if we have Excel, why can’t journalists and bloggers add and subtract, and do sensitivity analysis?
From Dobridge, Hooper, Slok, “Overview of the 2010 Health Reform Bill,” Deutsche Bank Global Economic Perspectives March 31, 2010. [not online]
Congress seeks more information on health care charges
AT&T announced last week that it would charge $1 billion against its earnings as a result of the recently passed health care bill. Other companies also announcing charges include Caterpillar ($100 M), John Deere ($150 M), and
MMM ($85-90 M). Analyst David Zion of Credit Suisse estimated that S&P 500 companies will rack up a combined $4.5 B charge.
Why reform health care?
Amidst all the preoccupation with the procedural details of how health care legislation is likely to be implemented, I was glad to see Paul Krugman make the case for why reform is needed in the first place.
The Mason-Dixon Line in Health Care Reform: Economists Edition
The WSJ Real Time Economics blog has posted the letters for and against the health care reform bill winding through Congress. The most interesting thing about the lists of signatories is the geographical divide. It was so interesting, I did a fast tabulation (so, don’t quote me on it), and what one finds is that of the list in favor, only 2 of 41 economists are affiliated with institutions in the South (defined using the most restrictive definition in this Wikipedia page — so to be completely accurate, I haven’t used the actual Mason-Dixon line). Of the 131 signatories to the against letter, 40 are affiliated with institutions in the South, i.e., essentially 30% of the total. A list of affiliations is below:
Off-balance-sheet federal liabilities
Just how much has the U.S. government promised to pay?
Worth reading
Links to a few items I found interesting on non-residential structure investment, the “bad bank” proposal, and separation of powers.
The politics of future promises
I have been detailing concerns about meeting the pension and health care obligations of the city and county of San Diego. Although these challenges arise at the level of our local government, the problem appears to be national in scope, as a sampling of stories from PensionWatch makes clear.