Rethinking the Economy

Snow isn’t the only thing in DC causing a little chaos. Rep. Paul Ryan, ranking member on the Committee on that Budget, has produced a Roadmap to eliminate the budget deficit. To do it, he turns Medicare and Social Security into voucher programs and cuts benefit increases. From the Executive Summary:
* Preserves the existing [...]

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A lot of progressives are really pissed off at the crappy compromises that went into the healthcare bill. So am I. But after having a little time to let go of the fury I felt at just how much we’d lost, and after learning more about the details, I now think some of our [...]

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How do you do smart, funny progressive propaganda? Like this:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell
And that’s pretty damn impressive considering how hard it’s becoming to parody insurance companies.
Take the letter America’s Health Insurance Plans’ President and CEO Karen Ignagni sent to Max Baucus. Among other requests, Think Progress explains, the insurance [...]

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As we’ve seen, Big Pharma’s very sophisticated in how they pollute the info doctors and patients have take decisions about drugs. Food manufacturers? Not so much.
A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, is “designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter [...]

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Aside from being truly appalling, the subject of last week’s post is a great example of how traditional economic models don’t work. To recap via the New York Times:
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their [...]

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Monday’s post explored how Big Pharma ghostwrites articles for doctors to promote their drugs. Universities, the AMA — they’re all basically do what they can to avoid seriously dealing with this crisis in medical ethics. Guess who’s decided to step in? Senator Charles Obama-wants-death-panels, “the government is a predator not a competitor” Grassley.
Grassley [...]

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In a post on the economic issues around health insurance, Professor Dan Saviro makes the standard “moral hazard” argument:
Consumer demand drives the market, but it is largely the demand of subsidized consumers who are not actually paying at the margin for what they get. Suppose that in the market for groceries or cars we [...]

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Matthew Yglesias says the folks pushing the public option need to calm down. Without the public option,
It wouldn’t be an ideal health plan or the best bill you can imagine. But it’s no exaggeration to say that it would be the greatest progressive legislative accomplishment in four decades, and that’s nothing to sneer at.
In the [...]

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Richard Thaler is a very smart guy. He’s one of the founders of Behavioral Economics — the folks who argue that people aren’t calculators. So when he jumped into the healthcare debate over the public option, I was eager to see his take on the debate.
Unfortunately, he turned off his behavioral economist brain and [...]

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If you’re a moderate or conservative, what do you get if you stop pretending that the massive government intervention into healthcare you’re promoting is a “free market” solution? You can build a pro-private sector health insurance system that actually works. Here’s how they do it in the Netherlands:
Health care in the Netherlands [...]

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