You think that we can measure the real quantity of healthcare well?
An attempted rebuttal to arguments by me, @joshbivens_DC, etc. that U.S. health care prices are unusually high: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything-you-know-about-healthcare-is-wrong-in-one-million-charts-a-response-to-noah-smith/ …
Good try, but I think it fails. If health care were a luxury, people would use more of it, not use the same amount but pay more (as we do).
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We can measure the quantity of specific services, and look at how their price has risen. Unlikely that the supply curve is vertical.
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Any good sources? In structural change seminars, people usually throw up their arms when asked about quality adjustments in healthcare. Not surprised if prices are up, but can we really say that quantity is unimportant?
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Tbh, I saw that he had included in kind transfers to household income & went "well, yeah, that will confound it." Govt spending on healthcare is high qnd we prohibit price negotiation on drugs. Including that spending in the income figure seems circular.
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Yep. That was the criticism of him that I made in my own post, but he doesn't seem to have registered it.
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Am I following this argument? He includes transfer payments which include spending on healthcare as part of his income measure. This makes income and healthcare spending more correlated since one is a component of the other. I.E., healthcare spending is correlated with itself.
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Excluding social transfers in-kind (stik) would dramatically *favor* the US since stik represents a smaller part of comprehensive income and consumption in the US than NW Europe.
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Besides the literature on this topic saying the same, it should be included because it reflects the resources available to residents.pic.twitter.com/XpEOhd5mSa
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And even the crudely adjusted AIC outperforms GDPpic.twitter.com/1oLkHG6X5k
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It's also a bit strange. You fret on one hand that worker take-home pay is being heavily impinged by high health spending and then, on the other hand, argue we can't reference comprehensive disposable income because somehow the whole thing is being inflated. Which is it?pic.twitter.com/59pO0IT2j5
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Nevermind that real AIC is already being adjusted for healthcare prices, so if this were merely about idiosyncratically higher healthcare prices instead of volume AIC it would be pushed downwards (which is also a problem for crude adjustment procedures given the higher wts)
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"If health care were a luxury, people would use more of it, not use the same amount but pay more." According to this study, the US does indeed use more: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.2.3 …
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So, it would follow then that if Noah could be convinced that there is more utilization (and "intensity"), then he would have to change his mind. For instance, he is just wrong here:pic.twitter.com/z6o0Q80xoO
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If you go to the report he linked to, it clearly showed there were more of the 5 selected procedures, on balance, in the US, though the author tried to waive this away. Specifically, there were clearly more c-sxns and knee rep in the US, contrary to what Noah wrote in the piece
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There was more info like this in the
@RCAFDM rebuttal
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"If restaurant food were a luxury, people would use more of it, not use the same amount but pay more" - an insufficient response.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Workers bear the entire cost of health benefits, many are effectively forced to use it or gain nothing as a consequence. Tying this product to employment was a big mistake that shoved a one size fits all on everyone, anticompetitive by design.
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Some perspective: Medicaid and Medicare, the two largest public alternatives, spend substantially more per beneficiary than employer-sponsored plans and account for about half of all spending in the US.pic.twitter.com/2m6tyRTYzX
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Yes, but presumably this is due more to handling those who have the most needs rather than poor management.
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I'd agree that's at least part of it, but weren't you just implying there was something distinctive about employer-sponsored plans causing people to use more of it? Presumably that should help offset the higher needs in these public programs
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Mostly that b/c it is a sought-after good and is typically applied company-wide and the price mechanisms are not always obvious nor how much your employer might pay increasingly toward health insurance over time. Price somewhat arbitrary in health care -https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/080615/6-reasons-healthcare-so-expensive-us.asp …
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One can tell many different stories about all manner of things, but this doesn't persuasively argue against the arguments I put forward.
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You asked me about a prior point to which I was clarifying. Your single point about per capita costs isn't really that compelling since it doesn't point to the drivers of those costs, but this chart seems kind of interesting. https://www.kff.org/health-costs/perspective/public-vs-private-health-insurance-on-controlling-spending/ …pic.twitter.com/ca0HxbS5dy
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Interesting to see gaps in coverage for seniors who then get gouged - https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/cost-sharing/ … Ultimately seems pretty obvious that health insurance fails as a private good and leads toward naturally monopolistic behavior.
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