24 Comments

I was going to mention and forgot, that I have just read it because it's been linked on Hacker News.

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I just read your paper, http://hanson.gmu.edu/econo... , in which you asked "Any publishers out there interested?" Have you considered self-publishing; you could fit your webbed papers onto one CD-R, and I would definitely be interested.

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You may be interested in this article comparing, with methodological notes, home birth to hospital birth, though this may not be the appropriate place to let you know about it.

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That's quite interesting. However, I'm disappointed by its weakness in addressing chronic depression or bipolar depression (which is usually chronic).

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"Turning 65 (and becoming eligible for Medicare)" =! "retirement".

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EconLog had a post on this a while back, covering Edward Hagen's view of depression serving the function of a labor strike. (But you can't believe everything you read.)

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An evo-psych question: why/how did suicide evolve? I searched a bunch but didn't find much.

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What is the evidence that people die from working too hard at their jobs?

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I think the danger is overblown much like that of AI (or climate change). Nanotechnology with the capabilities described in the early hypotheticals certainly doesn't seem imminent. But the future is always weirder than anyone imagines (even if sometimes someone nails an important detail). I think both are still opening new vistas that we will be exploring extensively for some time to come. Self-replicating nanobots and self-improving (foom!) super-human AIs are both 50+ years off.

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I'd love to purchase medical care guided or driven by prediction markets. Sadly, I don't think I will ever be permitted to do so.

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A lot changes in people's lives upon retirement; getting Medicare is only one of them. Deaths fall during recessions because fewer people are working too hard at their jobs; might not retiring similarly improve health?

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Do flu shots work? Is there any data on this question?

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Oh, and by the way, the authors of the paper are economists.

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Hey Robin!

It's not quite the Rand Insurance Experiment Part 2, but it's close. Patients who have just become eligible for Medicare die less often than patients who are slightly too young to qualify.

The abstract:

The health insurance characteristics of the population changes sharply at age 65 as most people become eligible for Medicare. But do these changes matter for health? We address this question using data on over 400,000 hospital admissions for people who are admitted through the emergency department for “non-deferrable” conditions—diagnoses with the same daily admission rates on weekends and weekdays. Among this subset of patients there is no discernible rise in the number of admissions at age 65, suggesting that the severity of illness is similar for patients on either side of the Medicare threshold. The insurance characteristics of the two groups are very different, however, with a large jump at 65 in the fraction who have Medicare as their primary insurer, and a reduction in the fraction with no coverage. These changes are associated with small but statistically significant increases in hospital list charges and in the number of procedures performed in hospital. We estimate a nearly 1 percentage point drop in 7-day mortality for patients at age 65, implying that Medicare eligibility reduces the death rate of this severely ill patient group by 20 percent. The mortality gap persists for at least nine months following the initial hospital admission.

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I'm on your island too... and so are America's founding fathers.

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One thing that I would like to see discussed is the definition of a right. People keep arguing whether or not health care is a "right." The people I tend to agree with say it is not a right but the people I oppose say it is a right. To me, when you say people have a right to health care, I think of it as the government can't pass a law keeping you from getting surgery or interfere with your ability to get drugs. I do not think it means government must pay for it.

But I seem to be on an island.

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