Supermarket snake oil: Should food makers have to prove their health claims?
Can a pill relieve the pain of rejection by friends, coworkers, lovers, etc? Apparently, Tylenol can.
I would rank this up near the top of the characteristics I require in an acceptable retirement environment:
From behind the wheel of his minivan, Bill Szentmiklosi scours the streets of Sun City in search of zoning violations like unkempt yards and illegal storage sheds. Mostly, though, he is on the lookout for that most egregious of all infractions: children.
Socialized insurance necessarily leads to socialized medicine, and if the government controls well over half of the insurance sector through Medicare and Medicaid, and tightly regulates the rest, it is only inevitable that it will also seek to control how health care is bought and sold.
David Dranove on ObamaCare, at The Health Care Blog
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
The Obesity Paradox: While overweight people are more prone to heart failure, patients with heart failure have lower mortality rates if they are obese.
MIT scientists are trying to enable Type I diabetes patients to test their blood sugar levels with light. It beats using a needle.
We previously reported on Larry Kotlikoffs 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 Posners comment at his blog:
Morgan Stanleys 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 reports list; only Greece comes close (3.12 to 1) Americas 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 governments 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.
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 offIf someone gives another person the gift of life, however, Ive noticed that many economists suddenly become agnostic. $100? Definitely an improvement. Being alive? Meh.
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.
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.