Cost of health care v. life expectancy [graph]
Here's a different way to view the same data: http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2010/01/the-other-health-care-debate-lines-...
Here's a different way to view the same data: http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2010/01/the-other-health-care-debate-lines-...
In a recent letter to Obama, 23 prominent economists identified four provisions that they said "can go a long way toward delivering better health care, and better value, to Americans." They are: ensuring that reform doesn't add to the federal deficit; creating an independent commission to bring Medicare costs under control; discouraging high-cost insurance plans by taxing them; and changing the incentives in medicine so that doctors and hospitals are paid not for how much treatment they give but for how well it works.
Many of these economists - as well as other health experts - are watching in dismay as the legislation's reforms and cost-saving measures are whittled away by powerful special interests. "It may be that the intersection between what economists consider good policy and [what Washington considers] good politics is very small," says Stanford University's Alan Garber, an organizer of the group who signed the letter to Obama.
According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,” Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.” When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.
The development of vaccines is one of the greatest medical innovations in history, saving tens of millions of people that otherwise would become significantly ill or deformed or even die. The only reason that vaccine denialists can now prosper is because of vaccines' past success.
See also
www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2008/09/the-controversy.html
