When Paul Krugman starts attacking us, we know we’re doing something right. John Maynard Keynes’s presumptive heir, Krugman apparently doesn’t like the findings of our recent book edited by Research Fellow David Beckworth, Boom & Bust Banking: The Causes and Cures of the Great Recession, exposing the profound fallacies of Lord Keynes’s love affair...
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The chairman of the Federal Reserve and the President of the European Central Bank, arguably the two most powerful men in the world right now, have done what many people had been asking for—fire the monetary bazooka that will supposedly obliterate the four-year economic crisis. In Europe, Mario Draghi announced he would buy unlimited...
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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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Twenty years ago today, an FBI sniper shot Vicki Weaver in the head as she held her ten-month-old baby at her home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The sniper also shot her husband Randy Weaver in the back, trying to kill him. Their son was shot in the back and killed the day before by U.S....
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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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In 1980, Census Bureau statistics showed that less than 1 percent of the population had been denied health insurance because of a health condition. Moreover, this was a period of time when there were few legislative remedies. Even so, this 1 percent was a politically vocal group and, in many cases, they evoked understandable...
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Do you care whether I have health insurance? If you do care, do you also care if I have other kinds of insurance? While you’re thinking about the initial question, here are a few follow-up questions: Do you care whether I have life insurance? What about disability insurance? Homeowner’s insurance? Auto casualty insurance? Auto...
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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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We are very pleased to announce the publication of our very timely, widely acclaimed, and compelling, new book on how to get beyond partisanship and special-interest politics to resolve one of biggest issues facing us today, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis by our Research Fellow John C. Goodman. Dr. Goodman is the renowned, free-market,...
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[The Independent Institute does not work to influence the legislative process, but we find the following information and analysis interesting and worth passing on.—Ed.] Later this year Americans could wake up to some unpleasant surprises: Higher fees and costs associated with banking, pensions, insurance, and investment; Reduced foreign investment in the United States and,...
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