Ezra Klein Archive: Health Economics
How Medicare -- and health-care reform -- help with 'job-lock'
One of the theoretical problems with our health-care system is that it discourages entrepreneurship. We get health care at a subsidized rate, with no discrimination for preexisting conditions, from our employers. But if we leave our jobs, we lose that...
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Ezra Klein
| February 25, 2011; 2:05 PM ET |
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Health Economics
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Health-insurance industry: Still not that profitable
The health-care sector is absurdly profitable. According to this data at Yahoo Finance, the sector-wide profit margin is 21.5 percent. But the insurance industry is one of its least-profitable parts: Its profit margin is at 4.54 percent. Hospitals are also...
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Ezra Klein
| February 24, 2011; 4:45 PM ET |
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Health Economics
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The problem is not MedicareandMedicaid. It's health care.
Paul Krugman has a line I like. "There is no such program," he says, "as Socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid." When we talk about entitlement spending -- which I do fairly often -- we group together two separate and very different spending problems....
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Ezra Klein
| February 16, 2011; 2:00 PM ET |
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Health Economics
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Greg Mankiw's thinking cap
There's an interesting mixture of callousness and accidental truth lurking within Greg Mankiw's satirical proposal to reduce the budget deficit: The essence of the plan is the federal government writing me a check for $1 billion. The plan will be...
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Ezra Klein
| January 20, 2011; 3:02 PM ET |
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Health Economics
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A very bad year for health-care spending
Spending on health care only grew by 4 percent in 2009. That's less growth than we've seen in a half-century! Hurrah and huzzah? A silver lining in an otherwise grim year? Well, not quite: When looking at health-care spending, you've...
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Ezra Klein
| January 6, 2011; 9:24 AM ET |
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Health Economics
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What happens when Medicare controls costs too well
There's one school of thought that says Congress is incapable of controlling costs in Medicare, and then there's, well, this: Want an appointment with kidney specialist Adam Weinstein of Easton, Md.? If you're a senior covered by Medicare, the wait...
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Ezra Klein
| November 29, 2010; 9:00 AM ET |
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Health Economics, Medicare
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