Some people look at the figure below, and say that too few insurance companies have too much of the market for Medicare Advantage (a program that allows Medicare recipients to get private coverage). But I look at it and think it looks like a pretty robust market:
What do you think?
A recent New York Times op-ed by Joanne Lipman poses the question: “Is music the key to success?” As a serious amateur musician, I have long credited my half-way respectable pianistic accomplishments to the discipline I gained practicing Chopin etudes, and even to the teamwork I developed practicing Beethoven piano trios. In fact, I frequently pull out these…
Taste versus health: That’s a trade-off we are often faced with when deciding what to eat. Some foods are bad for our health but happen to taste quite good. All of us have limited willpower, and when we are exhausted those unhealthy foods become harder to resist. But did you know that when willpower is depleted,…
A team from the CDC recently published an implicit study cataloguing the pathogens – the evil foreign organisms – that cause Americans to find themselves in hospitals with pneumonia. And the worst offenders? Viruses! Moral of the story – get your annual flu shot, and then cross your (sanitized?) fingers that some other bug doesn’t…
It is not unfair that we spend more on medical care for some people than others. After all, some people are sicker than others. If there’s anything unfair, it’s probably the uneven distribution of illness and disability. That said, the disparity in healthcare spending across people is pretty staggering. As this picture shows, courtesy of…
We have a vaccine crisis in the this country. Not just the one caused by anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy, scaring Americans away from life-saving childhood vaccines with pseudo-scientific claims about autism. Instead I’m talking about a bigger crisis, one caused by a dangerously thin supply of vaccines. Wise parents who ignore the blatherings of people…
Let’s face it – us men are disgusting. So public policy experts are left to figure out how to keep us from behaving in our normally disgusting manner. Here’s one approach (thanks to Geoff Riley for bringing it to my attention): Think it will work?