Quote of the Day
“Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.” – Helen Keller (Click to view comments)
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Is Medicare Being Too Generous To Rural Healthcare Providers?
If you live in the rural U.S., you probably face relatively limited access to the wonders of American healthcare. There won’t be as many physicians per capita offering you their services. This paucity of healthcare professionals will be especially stark for subspecialty care. There are not many ENT specialists opening up shops in rural…
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Medicaid Expansion/Lack of Expansion Plans: In A Map
For anyone interested in health policy, Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post has perhaps the most useful and informative blog to be found. Here’s a picture she posted recently, showing the status of state Medicaid programs, in a post exploring which states she expects to be revisiting their decisions about how, or whether, to expand in…
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A Thought on Mental Illness
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly. -E. Fuller Torrey (Click here to view comments)
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Provocative Piece On Behavioral Economics And Public Policy
The Financial Times, one of the great newspapers of the world, recently published a really nice essay exploring some of the controversies about what role, if any, behavioral economics should play in public policy. I’m going to give you a “teaser” of the article here, and you can always click on the link to read…
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How Long Will It Take to Get a Doctor’s Appointment?
A report on the Kaiser Family Foundation website shows how long it takes to get appointments with primary care doctors and subspecialists. The most dramatic finding comes out of Boston, where you can expect to wait more than two months to see a family physician. I expect the delay in seeing a family physician results…
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How Charlie Brown Prevents Traffic Accidents
Check out this wonderful street art, that seconds as a behavioral intervention to reduce traffic speed: Very cool! (Click here to view comments)
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The Mistake of Selling Your Car When It Reaches 50,001 Miles
You might think that the difference between a car that has been driven 49,999 miles and one that has been driven 50,001 miles is… 2 miles. But you would miss out on another big difference – in the price a buyer would be willing to pay for those two vehicles. Here’s a graph showing just…
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Careful When You Come Up For Parole
Parole boards are supposed to objectively assess whether inmates eligible for parole deserve to be released from prison before the end of their sentence. They need to determine whether people are reformed, whether they have been behaving themselves in prison, and whether they pose unacceptable risks to society. But it turns out their decisions may…
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Why I’m Not Sad That I Can’t Fly
I remember one time having a conversation with Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, about the topic of happiness and emotional adaptation, in the context of chronic disability. We were discussing emotional impact of experiencing a limb amputation. Kahneman pointed out that it is the loss of the limb that is really…