Vox.com has a new series called The Goods whose first article has the kind of journalistic quality (or lack thereof) you would expect in a series that seems to be purely about product placement. The article, by Kaitlyn Tiffany, is about…
Blog Archives
Fact checking Vox’s new product placement series. (They blew it on Pedialyte.)
Posted in Development, Health
Republicans hate “Obamacare” but love the policies whereas Democrats love it more than the actual policies deserve
NBC News did an experiment in 2014, four years after Obamacare was enacted. They polled half of their sample of Kentucky voters about what they thought of “Obamacare”, and asked the other half about “Kynect”, the Kentucky implementation of Obamacare.…
Posted in Health
Why are doctors willing to display ignorance of basic health economics?
In the Atlantic magazine, Rena Xu recently published an essay arguing that “electronic medical records and demanding regulations [are] contributing to a historic doctor shortage.” Although there are some grains of truth in the article, it is bullsh*t because it…
Posted in Health
The biggest health achievement in the United States in the last half century?
Kristof @ NYT: Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments? No, it was the cigarette tax. Every…
Posted in Health, Millionaire Superheroes
Drinking culture in Central America is the opposite of what you see in the US on Cinco de Mayo
I spent last fall in Guatemala, so I was surprised to discover that Guatemala has about the lowest per-capita alcohol consumption of any predominantly Christian nation. Latin America actually drinks less than the rest of Western Civilization and outside of…
Posted in Globalization & International, Health
Would universal health care boost growth in developing nations?
The Economist Magazine argues that the entire world should adopt universal health care because universal health care is both desirable and possible, even in low-income countries. Some countries achieved near-universal coverage when they were still relatively poor. Japan reached 80%…
Posted in Development, Health
Why I was wrong about the coming collapse of Obamacare
I’ve been teaching the conventional wisdom which says that a Bismarck-style universal health insurance program like Romneycare and Obamacare is like a three-legged stool. The three legs that hold up universal healthcare Bismarck systems like Obamacare are supposed to be:…
Posted in Health
Medianism 