Wednesday, November 17, 2004
About Me
-
- Name:B.K. Marcus
- Location:Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
B.K. Marcus is an amateur political economist with no formal education in the subject. He is a house husband, a faculty spouse, a dilettante, and a layabout. Once upon a time, he made a fair living as a web developer. If you accuse him of being descended from entrenched Establishment Keynesians, he will deny it!
Previous Posts
- why bk is not unemployed
- Cat Farmer
- Roderick T. Long
- Up with literalism ...
- ˘aptain-˘apitali$m
- liberal anarchism
- conspiracy theories
- the lazy gourmet
- Ken MacLeod
- Can we shoot nihilists?
Links
- bk's homepage
- bk's other writing
- "to quote myself ..."
- bk's economics portal
- 3 tiers of belief (3E/3P)
- BlackCrayon.com
- random blog entry
Random Quotes
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
-- Murray Rothbard
3 Comments:
I followed the links back to the analysis blog and then the Heritage Foundation, but I can't tell what "CMS" is. Can you fill me in?
Also, drawing on Wendy McElroy's thoughts about reading data critically (http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2002/0219.html), what do you make of the source for the analysis blog being the Heritage Foundation?
I want to emphasize the title itself: numbers that should surprise no one!
All you need to understand is marginal cost plus supply&demand to predict exactly what the CMS's numbers show.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is a Federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
I know very little about the Heritage Foundation, other than that they are socially conservative as well as fiscally conservative. But they're not the source of that chart, any more than the analysis blog itself is. (Analysis, by the way, is run unofficially by several folks from FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, which I cite here all the time.) The source for the data was the federal government -- CMS -- and the source for the chart itself is also the federal government: the Joint Economic Committee. I'm very skeptical of the federal government itself, of course, but it seems like a good source in this context.
Really, there's nothing controversial about any of this. It could have come right out of any introduction to Microeconomics course. In the insurance business, the phenomenon is called "moral hazard" -- meaning people make different decisions when they do and don't have to bear the costs of those decisions.
-bk
Hi bk,
Thanks for filling in that info: very helpful. I wasn't actually expressing surprise at the numbers--just curiosity about how they were attained.
Do you know whether CMS also considered other factors in their study, such as increasing costs coming from new technology and new drugs that might not have been available during the earlier years of the data, but that raise costs?
I suppose I am just wondering whether the fact that those two changes happened over the same period of time actually indicates a causal link.
Thanks for the post and the explanation: always engaging!
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