From NCPA Health Alerts, September 7, 2011 There are not very many good things you can say about a deep recession. But from a researcher’s point of view, there is one silver lining. This recession has given us a natural experiment in health economics — and the results are stunning. But, first things first. Here […]

Theodore Dalrymple, MD worked for the British Health Service for many years prior to becoming a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. In the review section of last weekend’s Wall Street Journal he wrote an article based on his British experience, “New Efficiencies in Health Care? Not Likely.” He began with this: “All […]

How can the federal government encourage low-cost, high-quality medical care? There are basically two approaches: a bottom-up, market-based approach and a top-down command-and-control approach: The former is based on competition, markets and economic incentives; the latter is based on rules, regulations, fines and penalties. The former gets the economic incentives right for all of the […]

I have decided to devote my first Health Alert of the New Year to “tolerance” and “rational thought” — terms that are rarely conjoined. The next time you are in an argument with someone over a public policy, stop and ask yourself: Can you summarize your opponent’s position in words that he would recognize and […]

Here is Goodman’s Law for Efficient Purchasing: There is no such thing as a smart formula. A recent news articlereported Medicare paying $800 to rent a wheelchair that could have been purchased outright for $350. I sometimes wonder if health economists actually understand how other markets work. Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose you ran […]