Here are four surprising facts: (1) the subject on which there is the most disinformation is “taxes”; (2) almost all the disinformation comes from the left; (3) it is spread to the general public by the mainstream media; and (4) it is almost never fact-checked. More.
John C. Goodman
11 Billion Prices
In 2011, Tom Saving and John Goodman pointed out in Health Affairs that Medicare was setting 6 billion prices on any given day. Writing at Forbes, Goodman says that today that number has almost doubled — to 11 billion. And the way Medicare pays, is the way employers and insurance companies also pay. Of all the things that are bad about our health care system, this probably should rank near the top. Yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves. See: What’s Wrong with the Way We Pay Doctors?
What The Left Is Getting Wrong About the GOP’s Health Ideas
Why We Are Not Getting All the Medical Care We Need
Even though the United States has the most expensive health care system in the world, we have fewer doctors per capita than most other developed countries, and they are seeing patients less often.. The average wait to see a new doctor in this country is 3½ weeks. At the worst-performing hospitals, one in ten visitors to the emergency room leave without ever receiving medical attention – apparently because they get tired of waiting. Solutions: Let nurses practice to the top of their training and open new avenues for foreign-trained doctors and medical school graduates without residencies. More.
Why Health Policy Problems Rarely Get Solved, Part II
People with costly medical problems who lack the ability to pay for their medical care and also lack health insurance pose a social problem. The American way of dealing with that problem is to force the private sector to bear the full cost of solving it. In response, employers have adopted health plans that are attractive to the healthy and unattractive to the sick. More.
How to Fix the Social Security Benefits Tax
Why Health Policy Problems Rarely Get Solved
All government regulations face a persistent problem. By their very nature they are trying to keep people from acting in their own self-interest. Either they try to keep people from doing what they want to do, or force them to do something they don’t want to do. In health care, no one in the system, including the regulators themselves, has a self-interest in making sure the system works the way almost everyone thinks it should work. More.
Exposing Climate Fictions
It seems like the real “climate deniers” are the people who keep repeating myths and ignoring facts. Here are some examples:
Polar bears are doing just fine: “The population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000.”
So is the Great Barrier Reef: For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986, with 2024 setting a new record.
So are the small Pacific islands: Almost all atoll islands are stable or increasing in size. In fact, scientific literature has documented this for more than a decade.
Heat is not more dangerous than cold: In July, President Biden claimed “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.” He is wrong by a factor of 25.
Reason for Our Health Care Crisis: Government
Michael Cannon argues that all of our major health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc.) came into existence primarily to solve problems created by previous government interventions. And, the reason why there is a continuing push for further reform is because all the programs that are supposed to be solving problems are creating new ones. More.
Why We Hate Each Other, Part II
The vast bulk of people who are writing and evaluating health care programs reveal a bias based on which party designed the program, not on how well it works relative to other programs. The biggest problem with tribalism is this: It is in the self-interest of politicians to come up with new solutions to persistent problems; but once an idea is proposed, the knee-jerk reaction is for everyone in the other party to dismiss it– no matter how good the idea is. More