A response to my least charitable critics on health care
Yes, health care is growing non-linearly, and US spending is still well explained by income.
Random Critical Analysis
Critical analysis of topics that interest me.
Latest posts
It’s still not the health care prices (2017 edition)
Health care prices are still not inexplicably high (circa 2017); America spends more because it consumes much more per person.
I created a primer on fundamental misconceptions about health care
Linking to my primer on fundamental misconceptions about health care -- so that it may be discovered by blog readers.
Noah means Noah: the high income-elasticity of health expenditure does not mean we are all going to starve!
No, @Noahpinion, we can spend proportionally more on health care and still consume much more of everything else. This is easily explained by productivity.
A tale of two covariates: Why OWID and company are wrong about US healthcare
Properly understood, US healthcare is NOT an outlier. The slope is very consistent with the pattern of diminishing returns observed in other high-income countries. Obesity and related factors drive the intercept down. Read More
Why everything you have said about the determinants of health expenditure is wrong in one million charts: a response to Noah Smith.
Disclaimer: The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and I fell slightly short of one million charts. Also, Noah probably isn’t wrong about everything he’s ever said on this topic, just the central points under contention, and he has tons of company. Noah Smith (Noahpinion) recently published a column in Bloomberg with the title “Health-Care Costs Are...
On the relevance of the income inequality to expected health expenditures.
Last week, Hubert Biscuit posted a response on Medium questioning the relevance per capita income to national health expenditures. Here’s more on the debate about the source of high US health care spending. | “Are high US healthcare costs just an illusion?” by Hubert Biscuit https://t.co/bpcvo4gwoK Note that nothing here argues for or against prices as the...
It’s not the prices, stupid. A response to Austin Frakt’s and Aaron Carroll’s NYTimes article
Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll recently wrote a piece for the New York Times re-hashing Uwe Reinhardt’s fifteen-year-old argument (“It’s The Prices, Stupid”) that high prices explain why US healthcare spends so much more than other countries. (Shhh, it’s the prices.) | Why the U.S. Spends So Much More Than Other Nations on Health Care https://t.co/qrGyiXUsnr —...
Health care prices do not play the role most believe
As I mentioned in two (long) posts on how comprehensive measures of household consumption or disposable income explain high US national health expenditures (NHE) rather well, I believe US health expenditures are overwhelming accounted for by higher volume of health consumption (the quantities of goods and services consumed in the health care sector). I reject the popular notion that…
No, US school funding is actually somewhat progressive.
Note: I have already touched on these issues in a much longer, much broader post on education and on twitter at some length, however I thought it’d be useful to zoom in on this issue and marshal the evidence in one place for future reference. It is still commonly supposed by much of the public that school...