adam's tumblelog

Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform.

“What is going to happen is insurers are going to say, ‘The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force doesn’t support screening. We’re not going to pay for it,’” said Dr Daniel Kopans, professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a senior radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“There were no new data to assess. One has to wonder why these new guidelines are being promulgated at a time when healthcare is under discussion and I am afraid their decision is related to saving money rather than saving lives,” Kopans said.

Chapter 2 of my favorite textbook has a box on David Romer’s work on 4th down strategies in football. One fan of this work is Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick, who recently applied Romer’s analysis. Click here to learn more. It did not work out well in this particular case, and Belichick is coming under some heat for his call. This does not mean Romer and Belichick are wrong. Some strategies that fail ex post might be optimal ex ante. Randomness is a fact of life, even if Patriots’ fans do not fully appreciate it.

The revelation was Eliot Spitzer, who was impassioned, fluent, compelling, and clearly enjoying himself. He made some very good points: how come Tim Geithner has managed to get away without ever being forced to justify the decision to pay all of AIG’s counterparties at 100 cents on the dollar? How come no one in the White House seriously pushed for judges to be able to modify mortgages in bankruptcy? How come more effort hasn’t been spent on preventing manufacturing jobs from disappearing, given that once such jobs go, they never come back?

It’s funny, but something came to mind that Lawrence Taylor, of all people, once said. The night the New York Giants retired the great linebacker’s number, Taylor, the first “LT,” in thanking his adoring fans, said during his halftime speech “there would have always had been a Lawrence Taylor, but without you, there wouldn’t have been an LT.”

We’re going to need to start paying attention to the people in the stands if we want to get past our current economic moment, because it’s the people in the stands who buy all the stuff that drives economic growth, because it’s the people in the stands who actually build the stuff. We’ve been playing to the cult of the individual for a long time now, and all it’s left us is a market crash and Kevin Federline.