Whether or not it is a good idea to mandate preventive service is a worthy debate. The problem with mandates is that without hospitals and health plans competing on the basis of price, quality and other amenities, the services are likely to become worthless.
Category: Devon Herrick
NYT: Trump Halts NIH Research Funding of the Effects of Climate Change on Health
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it will stop funding research on the health effects of climate change. This was a blow to researchers who had hoped to enrich themselves while engaged in activism aligned with partisan research.
Do Regulations Make Daycare Safer or Just Less Affordable?
Every daycare death is a tragedy, but they are relatively rare. The study is dated, but from 1985 to 2003 about 1,000 children died during daycare arrangements. That is about one a week, out of a population of 10 million. A back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests that is a yearly probability of death of about 1-in-200,000.
Would You Pay Extra for Better Access to a Physician?
There are no easy solutions to ease the physician shortage. If doctors agreed to work 12-hour days, seven days a week that would about double the capacity. Of course that’s not going to happen. Or doctors could cut down the length of each visit from 10-15 minutes to 5-7 minutes. I doubt that would really work well either. But what if you could pay to jump to the head of the line? Or pay extra to make the line much shorter? That is possible, if not controversial.