ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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Thanks for calling Mahar out on this. I can't even figure out at this point why anyone let's her get away with the TITLE of the book, since even if we accept her argument, it tells us nothing about the COST of health care, only about the SPENDING on it.
Nice article.
However, AK says: "More research on medical protocols, such as a recent heart stent study, would help doctors make better decisions."
Masses of this kind of research is being done and has been done for the past couple of decades - the problem is that although the extra information generated has some effect, it doesn't have all that much effect.
Here in the UK there has developed a government-funded command and control healthcare economy which advertizes itself as 'evidence based' and is supposed to provide rational guidance/ mandatory regulation of health protocols. In fact, these organizations make arbitrary decisions as to what counts as evidence, and/ or employ non-transparent methods (eg committees of 'experts') for generating their regulations.
The government agencies have been more or less forced to do this by the fact that the 'evidence' almost never leads to clear, precise, unambiguous and scientifically-valid understanding of medical issues - so in the end decisions get made by sheer assertion (behind a smokescreen of statistical malpractice).
I agree with AK's prescription for health services, but I just don't think that 'more research is needed' is a reasonable recommendation. US medical research funding doubled in the last decade - clearly this can't go on much longer. Soon we will have to do without 'more research'.
www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/funding
Bruce, even though we spend a lot on medical research, I think that if we shifted a billion dollars out of spending on medical services and put that into research on the effectiveness of protocols, there would be a large gain in well-being.
I agree, though, that decision-makers have to have the incentives and know-how to use the results of these studies, or else it gets wasted.