Comments on: The flipside of medicare efficiency

By: Misconceptions about the Debt « Scientific Clearing House

Misconceptions about the Debt « Scientific Clearing House — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:20:21 +0000

[...] I have argued before that spending 80% of our GDP on healthcare may not be so unreasonable (see here). Also, discretionary spending like scientific research, national parks, infrastructure projects [...]

By: More on health care costs « Scientific Clearing House

More on health care costs « Scientific Clearing House — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:07:11 +0000

[...] posted previously that the rising cost of health care may not be a bad thing if it ends up providing jobs for the [...]

By: ishi

ishi — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 09:56:54 +0000

my doctors were fine—i dont know their pay but likely lognormal.
on the other hand, how does one distinguish between a so-called creative person (eg uncle tom freedman who writes a whole column for the nyt—’the word is fat’) and say, someone like ramunajan (indian mathematician or porch n-r) who actually did something.
i’m sure tom freedman would like to have a ramunajun giving him a shower in his old age. or, nih might like to do a study, on why some people refuse to work for Philip morris on chaos theory, so it can be sold safely to the 3rd world (eg hsu on low iqs).
we could have 8 caregivers for each talking head or arxiv author—i think this follows (assuming no rent seeking/GMU/lucas/rbc/hayyek) from entropic gravity. .

By: Carson Chow

Carson Chow — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:24:47 +0000

Well, healthcare could be more expensive and safer. We could hire a caretaker for each elderly person for example. Rent seeking will be a problem and must be dealt with in some way. I’ll tell you right now that many of the physicians I know are not overpaid.

By: liberal

liberal — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:42:35 +0000

I’m skeptical. If all that increased cost went to orderlies, maybe. But a large amount goes to physicians, health insurance executives, pharma execs, pharma stockholders.

Furthermore, I don’t really agree with the overall premise. If the concern is having something for people to do, I’d rather we pay people to dig holes and fill them back up, repeatedly. Inefficient health care actually kills people.

By: Carson Chow

Carson Chow — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:42:19 +0000

NIH funding goes under basic research and is not included in health care expenditures so it would not directly benefit me.

By: ishi

ishi — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 11:33:19 +0000

i gather you’re at nih (which i am familiar with—i remember seeing a talk at NIH on choas theory and the brain—funded by philip morris co. ‘how to make cigarette Ceos safe’.) so 80% spemt on health care might benefit you.

might benefit me too—-i just racked up 200G in hospital bills for pneomonia (and they cut it down to less than 10G due to my finances) so i was thinking i could stay there or maybe move to another hospital for 3 months. they have food. kinduh boring though—and the staff is underpaid likely.

i possibly could do a ‘creative’ job (eg that fake who was at GMU on the ‘creative class’). problem is there’s no market for lots of creativity—whether math or music. its all lotto and walmart, and maybe nih (to study that).