links for 2008-01-03

• Are young Danes really emigrating because of high taxes? - Justin Fox
• Do not forget about imports - Brad Setser
• Spawning Something Fishy - Olivia Judson
• MIT economist sees U.S. weathering $100 oil - MIT News Office
• Can anyone make money off the real-estate bubble? - Daniel Gross
• Free Green house gas cuts: Too Good to be True? - Jaffe, Schatzki, Stavins
• Minutes of FOMC Meeting December 11, 2007 --January 2, 2008
• Safety & efficacy of prescription drug regulation - Philipson, Sun - Vox EU
• Torture Tapes to Get Outside Prosecutor - Washington Monthly
• Tax Deductions and the Timing of Babies' Births - The Tax Foundation
• A Former Reporter on Why TV News is So Wretched - naked capitalism
• Don't Dismiss Populist Rhetoric - Marie Cocco
• Fed Rate Cut Discussion Stirs Up Concerns - New York Times
• No Insurance, Poor Health - New York Times

Comments

[anne]

Understanding what we were thinking and what we were driven to think and how and with what rationale in moving to an invasion and occupation of Iraq is essential, and Paul Krugman reminds me what it meant for a person such as Rupert Murdoch to have published more than 175 newspapers and magazines, printed more than 40 million newpapers a week, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Of course, there are in addition the television networks controlled by Murdoch that reach far more than 40 million people on a day.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/opinion/03thu3.html?ref=opinion

January 3, 2008

No Insurance, Poor Health

The case for providing health coverage for all Americans got even more compelling in the past week when two new studies presented the most comprehensive evidence yet that lack of health insurance is seriously harmful to a patient's health. The studies found that uninsured people suffer significantly worse outcomes from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer than those who have coverage.

One study by researchers at Harvard Medical School, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that uninsured near-elderly people got sicker at a faster rate than comparable people with insurance. Those disparities were sharply reduced when people turned 65 and became eligible for Medicare. Those who previously had insurance reported no significant change in their health as they transitioned to Medicare, but those with little or no prior coverage reported a substantial slowing of the decline of their health. It was strong proof of the value of Medicare's universal coverage for elderly Americans.

The value was particularly evident for previously uninsured individuals suffering from heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure or diabetes. Once on Medicare, they benefited greatly from medical management of blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels and quicker access to effective treatments and prescription drugs. They had 10 percent fewer major cardiac complications, such as heart attacks or heart failure, than would have been expected by age 72 based on their previous health trends.

A second study, by researchers at the American Cancer Society, found substantial evidence that lack of adequate health insurance coverage was associated with less access to care and poorer outcomes for cancer patients. The uninsured were less likely to receive recommended cancer screening tests and more likely to have their cancers diagnosed at a later stage, when they are less curable. They had lower survival rates than those with private insurance for several cancers for which there are screening tests and effective treatments, including breast and colorectal cancer....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/health/research/03heart.html?hp

January 3, 2008

Hospitals Slow in Heart Cases, Research Finds
By DENISE GRADY

In nearly a third of cases of sudden cardiac arrest in the hospital, the staff takes too long to respond, increasing the risk of brain damage and death, a new study finds.

Researchers estimate that the delays contribute to thousands of deaths a year in the United States.

The study was based on the records of 6,789 patients at 369 hospitals whose hearts stopped because of conditions that could be reversed with an electrical shock from a defibrillator — a favorite device in TV hospital dramas, when a "code blue" is called and doctors and nurses come running with a crash cart and paddles to shock the victim back to life.

In the real world, doctors and nurses do not always run fast enough. Expert guidelines say the shock should be given within two minutes after the heart stops, but the study found that it took longer in 30 percent of the cases.

The consequences were striking. When the defibrillation was delayed, only 22.2 percent of patients survived long enough to be discharged from the hospital, as opposed to 39.3 percent when the shock was given on time.

The study, being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is the largest ever to look at what happened to patients with "shockable" abnormalities in heart rhythm, and to correlate their outcomes with the time it took to deliver the needed shock.

Delays were more likely in patients whose hearts stopped at night or on the weekend, who were admitted for noncardiac illnesses, in hospitals with fewer than 250 beds and in units without heart monitors.

Being black also increased the odds of a delay, but the researchers said this finding probably reflected the quality of hospitals in areas where most blacks live and are treated, rather than a decision by medical workers to drag their feet because of a patient's race.

In hospitals as a whole, delays may be even more frequent than is suggested by the 30 percent figure in the hospitals studied, said the lead author, Dr. Paul S. Chan of St. Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., and the University of Michigan. Dr. Chan said that because all the hospitals in the study had joined a national registry on cardiac arrest, meaning that they were already putting special efforts into trying to meet resuscitation guidelines, they probably performed better than average.

The registry, created by the American Heart Association, keeps the data on which the study was based anonymous, Dr. Chan said, so it not possible to identify hospitals that performed especially well or poorly.

Dr. Leslie A. Saxon, chief of cardiology at the University of Southern California and author of an editorial accompanying the study, said most people probably assumed that a hospital would be the best place to have a cardiac arrest. But, Dr. Saxon said, the assumption turns out to be incorrect.

"I think it's something doctors have always known but not thought about," she said, adding that Dr. Chan's team had conducted a "great study" that would help doctors recognize the problem and try to solve it.

"This is the kind of data we need to say, Let's make sure these preventable things never happen on our watch," Dr. Saxon said.

While exact numbers are not known, researchers estimate that 370,000 to 750,000 hospitalized patients have a cardiac arrest and undergo resuscitation every year in the United States. In a third to half, the arrest is caused by an abnormal, too-fast rhythm that can be corrected with a shock, Dr. Chan said. (The rest need drugs or other treatments.) ...

[hari]

MSNBC - How the media works!

This picture of naked capitalism - after 9/11 - is something I've known from olden days. Yes, it's true Edward Murrow and their contemporaries did a fantastic job of keeping America involved both during and after WWII.
However, the truth of the media is its thirst for revenue on a daily/hourly basis specially after 9/11.

The dulling of America is a fantastic achievement of current media, and it ain't likley to stop any time soon!

[Farrar Richardson]

Stay home, young Danes and save the Danish Model!

[hari]

Henry Kaufman Takes the Fed to the Watershed (WSJ) -

He's the former bond market guru of (1980s) Solomon Bros.
The article is long but succint and considers Feds recent statement on transparency not realistic. The opacity of the derivatives market is what concerns Kaufman simply because Fed is not using its regulatory authority to manage how they operate these financial instruments...

[Mark Thoma]

Thanks hari. So people know the policy on the links, I do my best to only post open links - I don't put subscription only links on the list as I used to find it frustrating to click through on a link only to find I couldn't actually read the story.

I do put FT articles there though since, with registration, you get a limited number of free articles each month (30 I think but I could be wrong).

But that shouldn't stop people from posting links to anything, subscription or not, they'd like to direct attention towards.

I'm happy that comments are turning into a place where people can link to things they think might be of general interest, and for the discussion that occasionally breaks out about a link (meaning I should have done a full post...).

[hari]

Yesterday FT had an article by Prof Niall Ferguson:- Not Constantinople - Twenty Cent Paradigm!

I was attracted by the title but found the article informative on current US indebtedness and the Ottoman Empire in 1870s. Some of you'll surely find it more than interesting comparison because of the historical consequences to the Ottoman Empire (and also Egypt).

[Mark Thoma]

Thanks. I also posted this follow-up to that article in yesterday's links:

http://twentycentparadigms.blogspot.com/2008/01/not-constantinople.html

[Meh]

I'm sort of shocked. That article on Denmark was the most balanced and well-researched article I have seen from TIME magazine in a long time.

I'd like to back it up with an analogy to the New Mexico film industry. Taxes on production in NM are lower, cost of living is lower and I believe taxes are still largely lower than in California.

New Mexico has a lot of efforts in place to keep it's film industry thriving and to some degree it works. Certainly the education there is good.

And yet, talented cinematographers and other behind the scenes film staff form a steady brain drain to California, despite the higher taxes.

When it's put like this it becomes obvious why it's hard for a small place to hang on to some of it's "bright stars" and why tax rates are not really that relevant.

I'd note that the keynote interview used in the original article (which the TIME article comments upon) involved someone who moved from Denmark to Germany. Thus swapping a 63% top tax rate for a 42% one, plus having to pay health insurance and some other ancillary taxes listed separately in Germany. As such, experience indicates they probably swapped a 63% rate for a 53% rate. Not insignificant, but not as dramatic as some were thinking, either.