There have been two trends in US health care over the last decade. On the one hand, a lot of Americans have become, in any rational sense, over-insured: They get tested for things they’ll never get. On the other, there has been an abandonment of health insurance by the rich. If you peel the Census Bureau and DHHS figures, of those alleged “45 million uninsured Americans”, one-fifth aren’t Americans; another fifth aren’t uninsured but are covered by Medicare; another two-fifths are the young and mobile (they don’t have health insurance, but they don’t have life insurance or home insurance, either: they’re 22 and immortal and life’s a party); and the remaining fifth are wealthier than the insured population. Really. According to a 2006 Census Bureau report, 19 per cent of the uninsured have household income of over $75,000. Since the last round of government “reform” in the Nineties, wealthy Americans have been fleeing insurance and opting to bring health care back to a normal market transaction. And, if you look at the “uninsured discount” offered by doctors, one can appreciate that, for everything but chronic disability, it’s not an irrational decision to say I’ll get a better deal for my broken leg or my colonoscopy or my heavy cold if I just write a check for it.
Mark Steyn, “The Nationalization of Your Body”, National Review, 2009-07-28
July 28, 2009
QotD: Re-interpreting that number
July 22, 2009
July 21, 2009
iPhone as convenient marijuana lookup device
This is quite a cool idea:
We’ve seen a lot of unexpected, and sometimes cool, iPhone apps approved by Apple, but today’s news might top the rest. Apple has approved a marijuana — that’s right, marijuana — app called “Cannabis,” which lets users find the nearest (don’t worry: legal) supplier of medicinal marijuana.
Created by the founder of Ajnag.com, which was founded in 2006 and was the first medicinal marijuana locater on the Web, the new app is quick and easy to use. Simply open it up on your iPhone or iPod Touch and you’ll see a map with the nearest distributors. The app gives you information on each of the locations, and even step-by-step directions with Google Maps.
That’s not all, though — the creators thought of everything. If you run into any, erm, legal troubles with your newly-secured marijuana, Cannabis also gives you the locations of the nearest lawyers who specialize in marijuana cases. And, if you happen to live in one of the 37 states where marijuana is not legal, the app also provides you with the location of the nearest marijuana activist groups — so you can do your part to promote reform.
July 20, 2009
July 18, 2009
Healthcare costs
Several years back, Elizabeth worked as an office manager at a vet clinic. She enjoyed the work, although it didn’t pay well. One of the most frequent complaints from the customers was the high cost of vet care. This graph from The Enterprise Blog shows that the rates of increase in healthcare costs are intriguingly similar between pets and their owners (note the different scales on the left and right side of the chart):
The chart [. . .] shows spending on veterinary care, which I pulled from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and national health expenditures (for people) from the National Income and Product Accounts. Two things are interesting here: first, the rate of growth of spending from 1984 to 2006 wasn’t all that different — and in both cases, spending grew faster than the rate of economic growth. As new technologies are developed for humans, we adopt them for Bowser and Fifi — because we can afford to and we think it’s worth it.
Here in Canada, where we almost never know the actual costs of the healthcare services we receive, the stark reality that healthcare costs money is a nasty surprise. We don’t spend anything like the same real dollars on our dogs, cats, and other pets as on ourselves or our family, and the fact that we don’t have a clue how expensive it is fuels the constant political demand that we provide more “free” healthcare.
On the other hand, in much of Canada, it’s possible to get X-rays, MRI, CT scans, and other diagnostic tests done in hours or days . . . for your pet. For you, weeks or months before you’ll get your appointment. If only there were some obvious conclusion we could draw from these data points . . .
I wrote about the pet health/human health disconnect all the way back in 2004.
