Medicine Blogging

Of course, a lot of attention is being paid Michael Moore's new take on the health care industry; this is to be expected. A lot of bloggers have responded to the film, and to each other. This is also to be expected. Here's some of the best stuff:

Austin Goolsbee, Barack Obama's economic advisor, on the (un)feasibility of Sicko's policy prescriptions:

So, to do as Moore wants in the United States, you would need to do more than just overcome the insurance industry. You would need to cut the salaries of doctors, reform the legal system, enrage our allies by causing their prescription drug costs to escalate, and accustom patients to a central decision-maker authorized to determine what procedures they are and are not allowed to get. Unless every one of these changes comes together, Moore's new system would end up costing an enormous amount of money.

But Arnold Kling isn't buying what Goolsbee is selling.

Plus:

Jane Galt (er, Megan McArdle) on Matthew Yglesias on CNN:

Aside from that, however, most of my ideas are simple, elegant, and doomed to die an agonising death in committee--like bringing back open wards, slashing the salaries of doctors and nurses, or denying expensive treatments to the elderly, disabled, and other severely ill people. If Matt has better ones for trimming down that 7.7% to a level where we might feasibly cover 200 million other people with what remains from France's spending, I am very interested to hear it.

Jane Galt (er, Megan McArdle) on adverse selection and moral hazard:

For those who are not familiar with the concept, adverse selection is what happens in markets like those for insurance, when one side has much more information than the other. In the case of health insurance, it means that only those who think they are likely to be sick will buy insurance; which means that the average cost of covering health care for those people will go up; which means that the health insurance company will raise the premiums; which means that those who aren't that sickly will stop buying it; which means that the average cost of covering health care for those people will go up . . . . and presto, suddenly there's no market.

And the Boston Globe on "medical self-defense"

I tend to be on Ms. Galt's (er, Ms. McArdle's) side of this particular debate. If we really decide that we want to spend a whole shit-ton more money on health care, and if we are willing to accept the tradeoffs that go with it, then let's do it. But let's not pretend that there is a magic bullet that can everyone free health at no societal cost. Using unrealistic hypotheticals (i.e. lies) to sell a policy that is based on normative priors and not positive analysis is not only bad politics; it's unethical.