This post on the concept of extended warranties from late last year on the blog Economists Do It With Models includes this quote from the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein: …the extended warranty is a product that simply should not exist. If Humans realized that [...]

Not that kind of reconcile. Time magazine has a good summary of a possible path to passage of the health care bill, which stalled after the Massachussetts special election last month resulted in the loss of the 60th vote for Senate Democrats to block a Republican filibuster. Now that it is clear that yesterday’s big [...]

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If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get anything done politically– and who isn’t these day–one reason may be found in the data provided by an analysis of 210 million public profiles on Facebook. Earlier in the week we did a post on an interactive map that resulted from that project, and which draws [...]

“Health insurers are not that profitable; as an industry, net profits were 2.2% in 2008…(T)his is in large part due to a lack of creativity and foresight…Most insurers are not much more than transaction processors and provider aggregators.” Two interesting posts from the blog Managed Care Matters on Anthem Wellpoint, the company that became the [...]

Following the health care summit on Twitter is as good a way as any… One Tweet puts its finger on one potential problem of an event like this: Some parts of the Health Care Summit that I have been listening to, have sounded like the adults in Peanuts- Wonk Wonk Wonk

Ted McCagg is a former advertising creative director that posts daily drawings on the Web. This one cracked me up.

The blog Girl on the Brink chronicles the day-to-day existence of “a professional, divorced urban mom,” laid off and “panicked, desperate and going-for-broke.” From last October 11, or Day 189 of her unemployment. Manifesto of the Idle Workers of the World We are more than 15 million individuals in the prime of our lives who [...]

Some healthcare-related content from around the Web: Do We Need Federal Antitrust Law for Health Insurance? (John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog) With the so-called health “reform” on life-support, Speaker Pelosi has suggested she might attempt to declare victory by crafting a bill focused on one narrow objective: eliminating health insurers’ so-called “exemption” from antitrust laws. [...]

Found recently on Barking Up the Wrong Tree: “Do the poor pay more for things than the average American?” Answer, according to a 2008 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research: Yes. Abstract: This research undertakes a carefully designed and detailed empirical study to gain insights into (1) the extent of price differentials between wealthy [...]