Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Using insurance to encourage vaccination

The most common proposals for pressuring people to vaccinate involve either vaccine mandates or vaccine passports.  As some of the comments on my previous post suggest, there is another option, viz., making the unvaccinated responsible for the cost of their covid treatment. In theory, this can be done either by denying insurance coverage to people […]

What Does Vaccine Effectiveness Mean?

What Does Vaccine Effectiveness Mean? by Peter Dorman  When technical specialists adopt an everyday word, they often give it a meaning that differs from its everyday use.  This can be misleading for nonspecialists, especially when little effort is made to explain the difference.  A well-known example is “significance”, which means one thing when used in […]

A little Bit of Knowledge

Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Saint Louis University discussing Senator Rand Paul’s outburst on the beginnings of the Covid-19 virus. “A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” ~Alexander Pope By now, we’ve all seen the spectacle of […]

Coronavirus dashboard for July 28: you’re reading the right blog, ghoulish edition

Coronavirus dashboard for July 28: you’re reading the right blog, ghoulish edition In writing about the economy, I make use of long and short leading indicators to forecast coincident indicators. In writing about COVID, the template isn’t much different: cases lead hospitalizations by about 2 weeks, which in turn lead deaths by about 2 weeks. […]

Medicare4All Rallies Shows Big Support for Universal Health Care

Dan sent this article to me and I scan-read it as it is done in generalities. This not a criticism of the content as much as my pointing out it is done in brevity. The push is big for some form of Single Payer healthcare if one were to call it “insurance.” At some point […]

Private Equity invests in “Primary Care” Medicine

I am adding a brief comment here (it fits and is on topic) rather than going back to the earlier post which I believe to be titled correctly; “Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry.” As my source of information I had identified two different articles taken from Modern Healthcare and […]