Economics and Healthcare
For some strange reason the distribution of great articles to read (and recommend) tend not to occur uniformly. They often come in bunches. I just finished reading two recent articles that I thought were exceptional.
The first is an article on Healthcare in the current issue of The Atlantic. It is entitled “How American Health Care Killed My Father” by David Goldhill. It is available here. Goldhill is socially responsible, a business executive and a Democrat. His thesis is on the need to positively change health care in the US by primarily focusing on the manner in which health care policy and practice reduces costs and drives the improvement of quality. While lower costs yielding higher quality may seem to be counter-intuitive, he makes a convincing argument that the policies and practices that drive run-away costs are the very same policies and practices that suppress options for improving quality. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of his assertions, recommendations or conclusions I find much of what he says to be worthy of serious consideration and, actually, consistent with my own health care experiences. Most importantly, Goldhill points out that these issues are not only under accounted for in the proposed health care legislation but that the current health care legislation may actually exacerbate high costs and low quality.
The second article is a piece in the New York Times magazine (Sept. 6, 2009) by economist Paul Krugman entitled, “How did Economists Get It So Wrong”. It is available here. Krugman’s article is a very readable overview of Macroeconomics and the historic 20th Century debates between Keynesians and Neoclassicists and how their debates did little to predict, avoid or even moderate our current economic crisis. He points out that both of what were once polarized sides in the macroeconomic debate actually came too close together to keep the dialog honest and both sides gave too little credence to the more contemporary, applied and pragmatic perspective of the Behaviorial Economists like Robert Schiller (he of “Irrational Exuberance” fame). You have to read it if for no other reason than to hear some economists talk of job losses as “employees choosing not to work”. That is what comes of economists who are employed and only have eyes for their computer models.