Stanford economist examined group decision-making and medical-care market
When he started a question with the phrase “I don’t understand,” he was being polite, said John Shoven, a Stanford economist: “He usually could have started the question with ‘You don’t understand.’”.. He presented mathematical proof “that when there are numerous options and a diversity of opinions no voting system can be completely fair,”.. he examined the problem of “asymmetric information” in the market for medical services and insurance... Dr. Arrow’s family tree was decked with eminent economists. His nephew Lawrence Summers is a former Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard. A relative by marriage, Paul A. Samuelson, also won a Nobel in economics, while his sister Anita and her husband, Robert Summers, were economists and both taught at the University of Pennsylvania.
GOP: Shop Around for Surgery
For people sick of high deductibles, Republicans offer high-deductible plans as replacements for Obamacare.
High-deductible health plans do cause people to spend less money on medical care—by about 5 to 7 percent. They especially avoid things like getting lab tests and filling their prescriptions, particularly in the first year they have the plan.
.. They also become more careful about going to the doctor. “You might give that upper-respiratory infection a few more days,” Lo Sasso said.
.. But the intended effect—that people will learn to shop around for the cheapest doctor—doesn’t always kick in. A 2015 study of a firm that switched to a high-deductible health plan found that the employees didn’t learn to price-shop after two years. Instead, they just reduced the amount of medical services they received, including potentially valuable services like preventive care.
.. That suggests people on high-deductible plans are getting less care, not just cheaper care.
Repeal and Compete
Modern conservatism, at least in its pre-Donald Trump incarnation, evolved to believe in a marriage of Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman, in which the wisdom of tradition and the wisdom of free markets were complementary ideas.
.. The essence of Cassidy-Collins, and the reason that many Republicans don’t like it, is that it isn’t actually a full Obamacare replacement. Instead, it’s a federalist compromise. It lets individual state governments decide whether they want to stick with Obamacare or not, which would mean that the law would remain intact in most blue states for the time being, while redder states would have the opportunity to turn roughly the same amount of money (95 percent) to a different end.
.. That end would look like one of the more plausible conservative alternatives to Obamacare: a subsidy to cover the cost of a catastrophic health insurance plan, plus a directly funded health savings account to cover primary care.
.. The peril is that there would be too wide a gap between what the money in your health savings account covers and what you need before your catastrophic coverage kicks in. In which case many people with consistent health care costs for chronic problems would rack up impossible medical bills in short order.
The Death of Clintonism
With Hillary Clinton’s loss, Democrats are burying a once-winning way of politics.
She embraced bold approaches on hot-button issues like immigration and gun control that would have been shocking for a Democrat in her husband’s day, and accepted what was arguably the most liberal Democratic Party platform in history, but that never seemed to be enough to satisfy younger voters, especially. “People thought she’d been conceived in Goldman Sachs’ trading desk,” says one veteran Clinton aide, noting the irony that this was millennial voters’ jaded view of a woman often seen in the 1990s as reflexively more liberal than her husband.
.. A Democratic Party that was seen as more sympathetic to criminals than to victims was not a Democratic Party that was going to win elections. Bill Clinton had to correct that, and he did, and by 2015 we just did not have that kind of violent crime any more
.. It is heartbreaking to have so many young people see him not as the guy who shut down the government to save the Great Society from Newt Gingrich
.. Panetta, whose late-career turn toward national security has overshadowed a keen political mind, thinks the surprisingly tough Democratic primary knocked the Clintons off kilter. “They had to deal with Bernie Sanders and the left. They had to make sure they retained that base,
.. She could not, or would not, say aloud what others in her party knew: That Obama had not only largely overlooked the concerns of white working-class voters but, with his health care overhaul, had been seen as punishing them financially to provide new benefits to the poorest Americans. Fairly or not, he lost the public argument.
.. “You didn’t hear a lot of people putting in context that before Bill Clinton, Republicans had controlled the White House for 20 of 24 years, that his last six years in office were with an all-Republican Congress, or that the main reason he got crushed in 1994 was that he was perceived as being too progressive on health care.