“Obama is living in a parallel Vulcan universe if he thinks he and his strategists can spend the next two months using campaign appearances, advertising, robocalls and other voter communication to demonize Republicans on Social Security, and then turn around in January and try to make a deal on that same issue.”

                                                                    — Mark Halperin, writing in TIME

Faced with mounting debt and looming costs from the new federal health-care law, many local governments are leaving the hospital business, shedding public facilities that can be the caregiver of last resort… More than a fifth of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals are owned by governments and many are drowning in debt caused by rising health-care costs, a spike in uninsured patients, cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and payments on construction bonds sold in fatter times. Because most public hospitals tend to be solo operations, they don’t enjoy the economies of scale, or more generous insurance contracts, which bolster revenue at many larger nonprofit and for-profit systems.

Full article on local governments leaving the hospital business.

We previously reported on Larry Kotlikoff’s assessment. The first issue of a new publication by Morgan Stanley called Sovereign Subjects is captioned “Ask Not Whether Governments Will Default, but How.” Here is Richard Posner’s comment at his blog:

Morgan Stanley’s report estimates that the ratio of current U.S. public debt to realistically realizable tax revenues is 3.58 to 1, which is the highest by a large margin of the countries in the report’s list; only Greece comes close (3.12 to 1)… America’s net worth is negative, and this negative net worth is eight times larger than our GDP. This means that the net present value of the government’s liabilities, minus assets, is approximately $120 trillion… At [some] point the bondholders, and holders of other contractual rights against the government, have to start worrying about the prospects for outright default or default through inflation. These are possibilities in our future, just as in the future of Greece.

The retail prices for some of the most popular brand-name drugs sold to seniors increased 41.5% over the last five years, while the consumer price index rose only 13.3%.

Seniors are overusing antibiotics, including newer, more expensive ones.

HT to Maggie Mahar at the Health Beat Blog.

Should you write health care or healthcare?

Why is it called CMS instead of CMMS?

If God is capitalized, should his reference be His or his? (Or her?)

Michael L. Millenson has answers at The Health Care Blog.

This is Bryan Caplan, writing at Econlog:

If someone gives another person $100, almost all economists agree that the recipient is better off…If someone gives another person the gift of life, however, I’ve noticed that many economists suddenly become agnostic. $100? Definitely an improvement. Being alive? Meh.

As I quip in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, “No one asks to be born, but almost everyone would if he could.” The same holds for sneaking $100 bills in stranger’s pockets.

Guess what? George W. Bush didn’t cut taxes for the rich. He raised them. He also made the system more “progressive.” As the graph below illustrates:

• People making $200,000 or more are paying 72% more in taxes than they did before their tax rates were lowered.
• Their share of taxes has climbed from 42% to 52%.
• These results hold, even a year into the recession and after the stock market slide.

See the full article on taxes and the rich here.

This report is better than the EBRI report (reviewed here). It includes a literature review of 31 other studies, including most of the vendor reports I have used in the past. Oddly, this review also excludes the American Academy of Actuaries study. Then it digs deeper into the experience of two large employers, one public and one private, that adopted Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) programs in 2003.

It compares the experience of the populations that chose the HRA with those that stayed in a PPO plan. It finds that the HRA choosers had substantially lower utilization in the two years before the HRA became available. But it also found that health care utilization started low for the HRA group, and got even lower after the switch.

Continue reading »

Like billions of other parents, Austin Frakt of the Incidental Economist is enthralled with his young childrens’ cognitive development. Wanting to be the best parent he can be, he keeps up with research in child psychology and the recent MRI-fueled bloom in brain development in hopes that it can help him stay “several steps ahead of” his kids.

Several steps ahead now entails trying to understand teenagers.

Continue reading »

In the U.S., a full-service egg implantation — including a donated egg, the lab work and the IVF procedure — costs upward of $40,000.  In Cyprus, you can get the same service for $8,000.

Nearly 25,000 egg donations are performed in Europe for fertility tourists every year.  More than 50% of those surveyed traveled abroad in order to circumvent legal regulations at home.  The Cypriot government estimates that, each year, 1 in 50 women on the island between the ages of 18 and 30 sells her eggs.

“It is twice as difficult to adopt a cat as it is to procure a human egg,” says Glenn Edwards McGee, editor of The American Journal of Bioethics.

Full story here.  HT to Marginal Revolution.  Do you have a problem with any of this?  Tell us in the comments section.