Medical Costs and Financial Regulation

One of the best places on the web to find links to interesting material on ethics and economics with interesting discussion thereof, is Mark Thoma's Economist's View blog.

A couple of recent links from there that are worth noting here on the blog:

1) The Cost Conundrum, links to this excellent piece of journalism by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker, tracking down the source of high costs in the U.S. medical industry. I may come back to this piece further down the line in my series of posts on ethics.

A couple of quotes from the article that I want to remind myself of when I come back to this later,

"The primary cause of McAllen’s extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine.

This is a disturbing and perhaps surprising diagnosis. Americans like to believe that, with most things, more is better. But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse."

...

"There was no sign, however, that McAllen’s doctors as a group were trained any differently from El Paso’s. One morning, I met with a hospital administrator who had extensive experience managing for-profit hospitals along the border. He offered a different possible explanation: the culture of money.

"In El Paso, if you took a random doctor and looked at his tax returns eighty-five per cent of his income would come from the usual practice of medicine," he said. But in McAllen, the administrator thought, that percentage would be a lot less.

He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves, apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from patient care. “There’s no lack of work ethic,” he said. But he had often seen financial considerations drive the decisions doctors made for patients—the tests they ordered, the doctors and hospitals they recommended—and it bothered him. Several doctors who were unhappy about the direction medicine had taken in McAllen told me the same thing. “It’s a machine, my friend,” one surgeon explained."

...

"I spoke to a marketing rep for a McAllen home-health agency who told me of a process uncannily similar to what Powell found in biotech. Her job is to persuade doctors to use her agency rather than others. The competition is fierce. I opened the phone book and found seventeen pages of listings for home-health agencies—two hundred and sixty in all. A patient typically brings in between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred dollars, and double that amount for specialized care. She described how, a decade or so ago, a few early agencies began rewarding doctors who ordered home visits with more than trinkets: they provided tickets to professional sporting events, jewelry, and other gifts. That set the tone."

...

"We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen,” he said."

...

A cardiologist tells an elderly woman that she needs bypass surgery and has Dr. Dyke see her. They discuss the blockages in her heart, the operation, the risks. And now they’re supposed to haggle over the price as if he were selling a rug in a souk? “I’ll do three vessels for thirty thousand, but if you take four I’ll throw in an extra night in the I.C.U.”—that sort of thing? Dyke shook his head. “Who comes up with this stuff?” he asked. “Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure.”

2) Credit Crisis Cassandra links to another hoocoodanode story, this one by Manuel Roig-Franzia in the Washington post telling the the story of Brooksley Born - an American regulator, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the late 1990's, who went head to head with folks like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers as they stymied her attempts to bring greater oversight and regulation to the derivatives market in an attempt to prevent the sort of financial debacle we are currently being subjected to.

A couple of quotes,

"Greenspan had an unusual take on market fraud, Born recounted: "He explained there wasn't a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him."

(Rumour has it Greenspan was up for baseball commissioner until word got out he was going to fire all the umpires since what team would play against another team that was known to cheat on calls...ok, I'm kidding, that's a joke - I hope)

"In one call, Summers said, "I have 13 bankers in my office and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II," recounted Greenberger, a University of Maryland law school professor who was Born's director of the Division of Trading and Markets. Summers declined to comment for this article.

The discordant notes crescendoed in April 1998 during a tension-filled meeting of the President's Working Group, a gathering of top financial regulators that periodically met behind closed doors at the Treasury Department. At that meeting, Greenspan and Rubin forcefully opposed Born's plans, Waldman said.

"Greenspan was saying we shouldn't do it," Waldman recalled. "Rubin was saying we couldn't do it."

The next month, Born released her concept paper anyway.

Within weeks, she was under attack. Lauch Faircloth, then a Republican senator from North Carolina, took to the Senate floor to call her "a rogue regulator." A Boston Herald column accused her of a "power grab. . . . She reached for that brass ring and in doing so cast a pall of legal uncertainty." Greenspan, Rubin and Levitt jointly urged Congress to pass a moratorium on the CFTC regulating over-the-counter derivatives. "

...

But then, in September 1998, a huge hedge fund that had bet heavily on derivatives -- Long-Term Capital Management -- nearly failed and had to be bailed out by a group of banks. Here was a living example of Born's prophecy. Even Leach, who supported the moratorium on CFTC regulatory action, introduced Born at a hearing by saying, "You're welcome to claim some vindication, if you want."

Born responded: "I certainly will not do so." But she went on to tell the committee that the Long-Term Capital debacle "should serve as a wake-up call about the unknown risks in the over-the-counter derivatives market."

No one woke up. That same month, Congress passed the moratorium. Born says they were "muzzling an independent agency."

Crash Course

No posting after today until March 11, most likely, as I'll be on vacation.

In the meantime, keep yourself busy reading Chris Martenson's crash course on the unsustainability of our economic, environmental and energy systems.

Sustainability has kind of been corrupted into meaning replacing your light bulbs, but we need to remember that it means things that can't be sustained won't be sustained and start figuring out how the core systems that keep our society functioning can be moved to a sustainable footing, because they're very far from one right now.

Not Partisan

One of my recurring themes here on the blog is that one of the problems with right wingers these days is that they have no ability to distinguish between things that are partisan in nature and things that aren't. See here or here for a couple of examples.

Just in case there are any right wingers out there who want to change this habit, here's a tip for the future. When a serious economic crisis threatens the country*, that is not the time for partisan games.


* On the off chance someone wants to try and argue we're not facing a serious economic crisis, save it. The prices of our main exports are plunging, our major trading partners are in recession and facing worse, some of the largest employers in the country are on the verge of bankruptcy, with many more of the country's biggest most stable companies needing to raise funds at distress prices and trading at levels that suggest very high risk, our housing markets are falling fast, government budgets are coming under increasing strain, and we're only getting started. Just because the coyote hasn't looked down yet doesn't mean we haven't run off the cliff.

P.S. What's wrong with Andrew Coyne these days? For someone who supports proportional representation he seems awfully bent out of shape at the idea of having a government that actually represents a majority of the votes cast for once.

And he's making all sorts of crazy arguments of the sort you'd normally associate with loony national post types (such as Colby Cosh who actually sees a day of trading in which the TSX dropped less than U.S. markets (comparing like sector to sector, e.g. financials were down 9% in Canada, 17% in the U.S.) and thinks that this proves that 'Money has cast a vote' against the coalition. People who have yet to realize that the TSX is heavily weighted in commodities and that on a day when commodities do poorly, the overall TSX index will do poorly, really shouldn't be commenting on the stock market, but that's what I get for reading the national post where the only qualification required is ideology not actual knowledge.