The Institute of Medicine says we are wasting 30 cents of every dollar we spend on medical care. Originally I was going to pan the study, but I can’t resist a good read. Like this: If banking were like health care, automated teller machine (ATM) transactions would take not seconds but perhaps days or...
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John Stossel has often said “government can’t do anything better than people in a free market.”  I recognize that lots of readers of The Beacon will agree, so let me throw out one example that I believe counters Stossel’s claim: GPS. Uncle Sam put up those satellites that produce GPS signals, and none of...
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One of Nobel Laureate George Stigler’s best-known articles is his “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” in which he argues that over time, regulatory agencies that are designed to regulate industries for the public interest become “captured” by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Stigler’s “capture theory of regulation” concludes that regulators end up...
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Yesterday on The Beacon I noted that the Federal Reserve’s new “quantitative easing” measure, QE3, is an example of crony capitalism: the use of public policy to increase the profitability of specific firms and industries. Today I want to compare QE3 with another example of crony capitalism to reinforce the point. General Motors provides...
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Lack of quality competition is in part the result of certain characteristics of healthcare quality. What we call core quality is not a variable at all. As I discuss in my recent book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, it is the result of other decisions made by the providers. Since the vagaries of medical...
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In Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign ad against big government, the narrator warns a young boy who’s parking his bike at grandma’s house, “Don’t look now young man, but somebody has his hand in your pocket. It’s the hand of big government. It’s taking away about four months pay from what your daddy earns...
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What do you do with a public school district that spends more than $16,500 per student, runs deficits upwards of $11 million, and where student performance has stalled? Outsource school management, according to officials in one Michigan city. Highland Park City Schools are among the lowest ranked schools in the state. Highland Park Community...
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There is no topic in healthcare that is more misunderstood than what other countries are doing. At both ends of the political spectrum, the mistake is the same: the belief that other healthcare systems are radically different from our own. They aren’t. Take the United States and Canada. I would say that the healthcare...
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Over the years, I have heard many people say that the government’s adoption of a laissez-faire stance during a business recession or depression amounts to “do-nothing government”—the unstated assumption always being that it is better for the government to “do something” than to do nothing. Recommending such a hands-off stance is often described as...
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There have been a number of claims that lack of insurance is life threatening. The most recent and well known is an Institute of Medicine (IOM) study claiming that 18,000 people die every year because they do not have health insurance.[1] Using a similar methodology, a study for the Physicians for a National Health...
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