healthcare

I am growing a bit weary of all of the doom and gloom associated with the coronavirus outbreak. And I bet many of you are as well. Unfortunately, it is what is dominating both headlines and people's minds because it activates deep-seated…

There is a shift going on in Germany which has the center-left party moving away from the center after disastrous election results. And I think this is a significant signpost of the center-left's abandonment of the policies championed by…

It looks like a shift in who spends the money but an overall reduction in how much gets spent on healthcare.

I just finished reading an illuminating article by Andrew Ross Sorkin on healthcare and it got me to thinking about a review of structural reforms by Dani Rodrik which encapsulates the problem with fixes to ‘competitiveness’. The message:…

Baumol was a giant in promoting entrepreneurship. And most importantly here, his theory on rising costs in labor intensive industries is something that the Nobel committee considered in 2003 and should have given him an award for.

During the government shutdown, the data for a variety of economic reports were halted. Therefore, I looked at alternative, private sector, data to estimate the government reports. One such model used the historical differential between…

It isn't yet clear how long the US government shutdown will last or what impact the shutdown will have. Nor is it clear that the US will escape a debt default down the road. Therefore, at this time all that reigns is uncertainty.

By Edward Hugh According to the Economist’s Buttonwood, “desperate times require desperate measures”. I am sure this is right, times in Spain are certainly getting desperate and many of the measures being implemented in Brussels, far from…

By Rick Bookstaber Medical care is famously immune to the usual market incentives; the patient has little reason to make a cost-benefit tradeoff. Doctors and hospitals hardly do either; indeed the opposite seems to be the case. Matters are…

Some thoughts on defined benefit and defined contribution in today's world of negative real rates plus today's links