Interesting Readings - Healthcare

International Comparisons

• • McKinsey Consulting study on comparative healthcare across wealthy nations (July 2009)

    • More on this. (New York Times, June 6, 2020)

  • Urban Institute on International Health Comparisons (August 20, 2009)

  • T.R. Reid's "Five Myths about Healthcare around the World" (Washington Post, August 21, 2009)

  • UK, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland (Frontline, April 15, 2008)

  • International health care cost comparisons from www.VisualEconomics.com (March 2010)

  • Health insurance in France (New York Times, Sept. 11, 2009)

  • Health insurance in Germany (Uwe Reinhardt, April 17, 2009)

  • Health insurance in Switzerland (New York Times, Oct. 1, 2009)

  • Health care in Finland...cheap thanks to low paid docs (ThinkProgress, October 26, 2010)

  • Health insurance in Hawaii (one of Barack Obama's homelands) (New York Times, Oct. 17, 2009)

    • The Daily Show on Hawaii's healthcare system. I look at that one surfer guy and all I can think of is "Moral Hazard."

  • Health insurance in Massachusetts (which is like what Congress is debating now) (Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, Nov. 12, 2009)

  • Health insurance in Maine (Olympia Snow's homeland) (New York Times, Nov. 10, 2009)

How much does rising income explain about rising health care spending? Views from Robert Fogel and Daron Acemoglu

What drives life expectancy? Smoking? Income?

• • The Preston curve

• Tierney Lab

  • What's killing us these days? (New York Times, Sept. 7, 2009)

Health Insurance Issues

• • True cost of health insurance (Slate, Sept. 15, 2009)

  • Insurance "rescission" (Slate, July 28, 2009)

  • Getting divorced because of health insurance reasons, Nicholas Kristoff, (New York Times, August 30, 2009)

  • Employer provided health insurance in decline (Slate, Sept. 10, 2009)

  • Wow, student athletes getting stuck with giant health bills. (New York Times, July 16, 2009)

  • Why denying coverage to illegal immigrants might be expensive (Slate, Nov. 20, 2009)

  • Hospital getting out of the business of caring for illegal immigrants (New York Times, Nov. 20, 2009)

Physician pay

• • How much should physicians get paid?

  • How much do they get paid, and is it so much that it's a problem?

  • How about compared to around the world? (New York TImes, July 15, 2009)

  • Do we have too few physicians? (New York Times, July 1, 2009)

Bending the cost curve on healthcare

• • Atul Gawande's influential article on healthcare costs. (The New Yorker, June 1, 2009)

  • Atul Gawande, Donald Berwick, Elliot Fisher, and Mark McClellan on "Ten Steps to Better Healthcare" (New York Times, August 13, 2009)

  • Just keep hospitals clean! (Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, Nov. 24, 2009)

  • (His other articles at his webpage are well worth reading too.)

  • Forget the Cost Curve (Slate, Dec. 2, 2009)

Martin Feldstein on the perverse dangers in "Obamacare." (Washington Post, Nov. 6, 2009)

How does our probability of dying change as we age? (New York Times, Sept. 14, 2009)

How did LBJ get Medicare and Medicaid enacted? (The New Republic, August 25, 2009)

Behavioral Economics and Healthcare (The New Yorker, James Surowiecki, August 31, 2009)

How did health care become a business? (Slate, July 29, 2009)

Jonathan Cohn's diagram of how the US healthcare system works. (The New Republic, July 1, 2009)

Jonathan Cohn's great book on the history of the US health insurance industry, Sick (2008).

Slate.com's guide to healthcare reform.

Why We Must Ration Health Care

By PETER SINGER A utilitarian philosopher’s argument for placing a dollar value on human life.

(The New York Times, July 19, 2009)

"Believing in treatments that don't work." (New York Times, April 2, 2009)

Ronald Reagan speaks out against the danger of socialized medicine (1961)