Michael Halasy to write for Angry Bear
Michael has written for Angry Bear in the past (see two of many Prometheus and Bundled Payments and Medical Tourism, separating facts from fiction). He is
a practicing PA in Emergency Medicine. My undergraduate education started with economics. I function as a health policy analyst for a couple of national organizations and as a health services researcher, working in a collaborative role on OR/SE projects and workforce/value studies as well.
Michael will be writing on healthcare, health insurance, US healthcare system economics and issues of policy.
Good deal Dan-o.
This is what I told my primary care provider:
Since 1968, average income has almost doubled — while median income has grown only 20% at most. So how can doctors keep up with average income growth — who is going to pay you? Minimum wage now $3.15/hr below 1968. The first-baseman who gets enough to buy half a stadium doesn’t have 1000 livers.
I could have added that health insurance has doubled and re-doubled while doctors incomes have remained stagnant (lately, as insurance skyrocketed) — hardly doubled and re-doubled! — so why should anyone try to slow down health care growth by cutting back doctors’ fees?
The only doctors’ incomes figures I have are that they jumped from $150,000/yr to $180,000/yr average when Medicare and Medicaid came in — around 1968. Now the average is $220,000. May be off the mark.
I too have been affiliated.with emergency medicine for 33 – 36 years. I have no academic background in economics but the debt-money-asset system in its time evolution is so definitely and elegantly patterned…… It has a patterned and predictable equivalency to physics and chemistry…..
It is the hypothesis of saturation macroeconomics that the debt-money-asset system’s equity class self assembles itself into ideal quantum patterns of growth and decay detailed in the Main Page of The Economic Fractalist.
From March 2003; the Wilshire has completed a 20/50/40 month fractal series.
The last 40 months since March 2009 the Wilshire, while having a sharp third fractal valuation rise, did not eclipse the 11 October 2007 high predicted prospectively in the Huffington Post by saturation macroeconomics.
In the US while the Wilshire represents only 15 trillion of the debt-money-asset system’s 190 trillions of value, its time dependent patterned behavior is the window into the integrative self assembly optimal valuation behavior of the debt-money-asset macroeconomic system.
This patterned behavior of the equity class elevates macroeconomics to a science.
Of the the US debt-money-asset system’s 52 trillion of debt, a good percentage will undergo default. A greater percentage of Euro debt will under default. The net effect of this default will lower total system wealth and the valuation of all assets except paradoxically electronic and US hegemony paper money and US federal debt whose valuations will increase as purchasing power increases relative to other asset class declining valuations.
A great equity crash will occur over the next 2-3 weeks in April 2012 likely following a 29 March 3/8/8day decay pattern.
It will be accompanied by a commodity and commodity’s future crash with the exception of:
US debt instruments whose values will rapidly rise will with US interest rates falling to 150 year historical lows.
It’s not physician outcomes in total. It’s the outliers. While PCP physicians incomes have actually decreased in terms of purchasing power, some specialists have seen HUGE gains in income. Interventional radiology comes to mind. What could be fixed is the income gap. From a workforce perspective, this is at least contributing to the maldistribution in specialty selection…..
lammert:
This styatement puzzles me:
“Of the the US debt-money-asset system’s 52 trillion of debt, a good percentage will undergo default. A greater percentage of Euro debt will under default. The net effect of this default will lower total system wealth and the valuation of all assets except paradoxically electronic and US hegemony paper money and US federal debt whose valuations will increase as purchasing power increases relative to other asset class declining valuations.”
Are you referring to Wall Street gambling?
Exactly as I always describe it; it’s just physics. If you squeeze a toothpaste tube at the bottom, it all comes out the top.
In the post-apocalyptic American labor market there is no back bargaining pressure at the bottom — back pressure slowly equalizes approaching the top 90% — where what is squeezed from the bottom 90% passes right through and out to the winners-take-all 1% or better.
You could not have summed up my position more succinctly. 🙂
lammert,
Exactly what I always say; it’s just physics. If you squeeze a toothpaste tube at the bottom, it all comes out the top.
In the post-apocalyptic American labor market there is no back bargaining pressure at all at the bottom — back pressure slowly equalizes approaching the top — where what is squeezed from the bottom 90% just passes through and out to the winners-take-all 1% or better.
You could not have summed up my outlook more succinctly. 🙂