I received a postcard in yesterday’s mail. The first paragraph reads: “The City of Tallahassee’s Office of Cross-Connection Control monitors actual or potential backflow via cross connections with non-approved water sources. We are committed to the quality of water delivered to our customers, and your drinking water remains clean and free of contaminants [sic]....
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If you ask a hospital in your neighborhood to give you a package price on a standard surgical procedure, you will probably be turned down. After the suppression of normal market forces for the better part of a century, hospitals are rarely interested in competing on price for patients they are likely to get...
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Why is the price of a knee replacement for a dog—involving the same technology and the same medical skills that are needed for humans—less than one-sixth the price a typical health insurance company pays for human operations? Why is it less than one-third of what hospitals tell Medicare their cost of doing the procedure...
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In fields as diverse as cosmetic surgery and LASIK surgery, we are discovering that healthcare markets can give patients transparent package prices and that costs can be controlled—despite a huge increase in demand and enormous technological change (of the type we are told increases costs for healthcare generally). For services as diverse as walk-in...
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President Obama’s policies have been criticized by some as harming the economy. The “stimulus” policies he has put into place are not working, according to critics. Indeed, the economic recovery has been unusually slow. Here and here are two of the many articles critical of the president’s economic policies. When I Googled “stimulus not...
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The premise of my latest book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, is that most of our problems arise because we are trapped. We are caught up in a dysfunctional system in which perverse economic incentives cause all of us to do things that raise the cost of care, lower its quality, and make access...
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Health Savings Accounts are the fastest growing product in the health insurance marketplace. Currently, about 25 million families are managing some of their own healthcare dollars as a result. Virtually every serious study has found that these plans lower costs without jeopardizing the quality of care people receive. In fact, most employers have decided...
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The war on drugs and the war on terrorism, I noted in a recent Beacon post, have fostered a crisis mentality that has eroded traditional constraints on domestic law enforcement. The new zeitgeist has resulted in police departments increasingly using “no knock” raids and other military-type tactics formerly considered off-limits to them. But other...
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One of the many pitfalls of Affordable Care Act, I explained in my previous blog post, is that it requires insurers to spend no more than 20 percent of their income from premiums on administrative costs and no less than 85 percent on medical care. Regulating the medical loss ratio (MLR), as it’s called,...
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The Affordable Care Act requires health insurance plans to spend at least 85 percent of their premium income on medical care and no more than 20 percent on “administrative costs”—the portion of insurance premiums that are not spent on medical care.[1] Here’s one immediate problem: no one knows how to define “administration.” Just as...
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