Technology is a significant driver of high health care spending. For instance, many treatments common today were not available 50, 40 or even 30 years ago. There are far more drugs and medical procedures than there were in the 1990s when I first began studying health care. Yet, treatments and therapies that have been in use for decades are still quite expensive. In typical consumer markets, the quality of technology gets progressively better while the inflation-adjusted prices often falls as older technology is surpassed by newer technology. This is especially true of consumer electronics but also true of automobiles, appliances and other types of consumer goods.
Category: Policy & Legislation
Portland Back-Peddles on Public Drug Use
There is an odd theory that making illicit drugs easier to use will make them safer, such as needle exchanges and safe injection sites. Other reformers argue that decriminalizing small quantities will avoid court costs and incarceration costs. Moreover, the proponents of the above theories believe the policy known as The War on Drugs has been ineffective and even racist.
There is another theory, one that is grounded in reason, common sense as well as backed by empirical testing, that demand curves are downward sloping. Similar there is an economic truism that posits if governments wish to encourage some activity, then subsidize it. If government wishes to discourage some activity, then tax it.
Wednesday Links
- Should the government be able to monitor (in real time) patients who get opioid prescriptions?
- There are now 3 times as many non-faculty as there are faculty per student at the best schools in the U.S. HT: Arnold Kling
- RAND report: Mainstream news coverage is geared towards upholding pre-established narratives. Actual reporting has become exceedingly rare.
- Study: Hospice care saves money.
- Why nurses matter.
- Study: two years after unionization, nursing homes were more than 30 percentage points more likely than nonunion nursing homes to report an illness or injury to OSHA.
Tuesday Links
- Labor Day good news: the number of hours worked per year, per worker has fallen by more than one-third over the last century.
- As your hourly wage rises, so does the opportunity cost of leisure.
- NYT on the reason A.I. is an existential threat: it will usher in an new era of neoliberalism.
- Almost 20 scholars offer remedies for revitalizing conservatism. A bird’s eye view suggests they all want us to stand athwart history and yell, “STOP.”
- Enslaved Africans were responsible for introducing the practice of smallpox inoculation throughout the Americas by the 1700s. Interesting, but speculative.
- Even the proponents of colonoscopies and breast cancer screening think they only lower cancer death by 20%. HT: Arnold Kling