What do retirement savings have to do with physical health? A new study from the journal Psychological Science finds that people who are good at planning their financial future are more likely to take steps to improve their physical health — and then actually become healthier.
.. Some people, he said, respond well to information and education, but others — like the employees who neither saved nor took care of themselves — may need stronger solutions. “Having a single-pronged policy is not effective,”
Healthcare: The necessity of innovation and the social value of gazillionaires.
While the Left rages about economic inequality, a phrase with a very elastic meaning, few people understand what I like to call the Social Value of Gazillionaires (SVG).
.. For example, there is a well-established pattern in automobile innovation in which safety and performance features are developed for high-end cars and then work their way down through the lines until they become standard equipment on ordinary vehicles. (Sometimes these are developed for non-production vehicles, especially racing cars.) The technology that coordinates seatbelt pre-tensioning with airbag deployment was first developed for the seriously expensive Mercedes S-Class sedan in the early 1980s, and within a few years Porsche was offering a similar system as standard equipment. Chrysler joined in a year later, and today very modestly priced cars, such as the Ford Fiesta, are available with side airbags and related safety features that were not available at any price in the 1980s. That’s SVG in action. Things like antilock brakes and modern throttle systems have followed similar patterns of development.
American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World
The average total price charged for pregnancy and newborn care was about $30,000 for a vaginal delivery and $50,000 for a C-section, with commercial insurers paying out an average of $18,329 and $27,866, the report found.
The average price spent on a normal vaginal delivery tops out at about $4,000 in Switzerland, France and the Netherlands, where charges are limited through a combination of regulation and price setting; mothers pay little of that cost.