Today’s Science Lesson
Today’s science lesson is sponsored by XKCD comics. You can find more at http://xkcd.com/, in case you haven’t checked it out before.
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Russell Wilson's Recovery Water: Miracle Cure or Magical Thinking?
Russell Wilson took a hard hit to the head in the NFC Championship game last year against the Green Bay Packers. His team, the Seattle Seahawks, won the game, but would Wilson, the team’s star quarterback, recover in time for the next game? That game, by the way, goes by the name The Super Bowl….
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Reaction to My Thoughts on Improving Ethics Education
A while back, I wrote a piece in the Hastings Center Report proposing a better way of teaching ethics to professionals, like medical students. I thought such education should be grounded less in philosophy and more in understanding the psychology of our moral behavior. Glad to see that my ideas have been picked up, in…
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Unnecessarily Uninsured
This picture, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows that many people who lack health insurance in the United States right now are actually eligible for either Medicaid or federally subsidized private insurance.
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Paying for "Patient Satisfaction" Harms Hospitals That Care for Poor People
All else equal, it would be wonderful if hospitals had an incentive to provide high quality care. It does not seem fair to pay the same amount of money to a hospital that does a great job of caring for its pneumonia patients and one that does a lousy job. For the most part, however,…
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Obamacare Isn’t Helping the “Tweeners” Much Yet
The Affordable Care Act has done a lot to increase the proportion of Americans with health insurance. I’ve posted a lot of those figures in the past. But here is some data, published by a former student of mine, showing that the law doesn’t seem to be having a huge impact yet on people ages…
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Improving Local Government through Behavioral Economics
A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of talking with government officials from across the state of North Carolina – mayors, city Council people, and the like – about the possible role that insights from behavioral science can play in helping them promote the well-being of their communities. Here is a really nice summary…
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Look Dad – I'm an Economist!
I recently spoke with a reporter about a new effort, by Medicare, to persuade dialysis centers to care for a wider range of primary care health needs for people with kidney failure. I’ll give you a teaser for that article below, but first want to point out what struck me as the most notable part…
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Absolutely Hilarious Nudge!
Here is a hilarious effort by Utah Valley State presumably to either keep people from crashing into each other while they text on the stairway, or more likely to show them how stupid it is to be engaging in that behavior in that location:
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At Risk of Financial Ruin
According to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the best sources of reliable health policy information, the majority of Americans will have to exhaust all their “liquid assets” to cover medical expenses, if they reach the maximum out-of-pocket costs allowed by their health insurance. The moral of this story is simple: stay healthy!