Interesting article about the Canadian Health care system
Anne Ferguson, my virtual assistant, was kind enough to forward me this article about health care in Canada. It gives a good overview of how their system works, how the single payer system interacts with private insurance and debunks some myths; for instance that Canadians can’t pay their doctors.
One data point that the article mentions is just how much time and effort doctors’ offices in the US put into complying with and arguing with insurance companies, rather than doctoring. With over 100 insurance companies to potentially navigate through, the payment system becomes complex, costly and burdensome. Surely there must be a better way…
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- Posted Rita McGrath on August 05, 2009
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Oh brother - careers in medical billing?
My colleague Ian C. MacMillan sent along a tidbit that definitely bears thinking about. It turns out that young people can actually build a career in medical billing. Yes, just finding the right codes for procedures and putting them on paper forms is enough to keep a full-time person busy! Not only that, but there are even dedicated educational programs to train people to do this. Providers actually offer degrees in Medical Coding and Billing. The mere existence of a need for such a degree does provide evidence that the system has serious inefficiencies, doesn’t it?
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Unintended side effects of post-9/11 fear of flying
Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali and Daniel H. Simon, writing in the journal Applied Economics (June 2009 - Volume 41, issue 14, pg. 1717) came to a fascinating conclusion. After the highly dramatic 9/11 attacks, many travelers elected to go by automobile, in preference to taking airplanes (as the airlines know all too well - their business really suffered after 9/11). One little-known aspect of these decisions, however, is that by going on the road instead of by air, passengers expose themselves to far greater risk. Indeed, in the US, close to 40,000 fatalities occur each year (according to the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The number of airplane related fatalities worldwide, in contrast is less than a thousand deaths, according to recent reports. The disparity in how dangerous the two modes of transportation are prompted the researchers to ask whether a side effect of the terrorism attacks (fear of flying) increased the risk exposure of people who chose to drive, rather than fly.
They controlled for time trends, weather, road conditions and other factors and found that 327 additional driving deaths per month in late 2001 could be attributed to a shift in preference away from airplanes and toward road transportation. While the effect weakened over time, the authors speculate that a smany as 2,300 driving deaths may be attributable to the attacks.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on July 07, 2009
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Total Recall - Closer than you think!
As many of you will know, at the World Economic Forum annual conference in Davos this year, I presented on the concept of Total Recall Systems in which everything you do and say is captured to be replayed. Well, lo and behold if it isn’t becoming a reality much faster than many of us thought. My parents sent me this clip from the BBC which reports how a Google product that captures images of people on the street helped police catch a couple of muggers, because the cameras had snapped their images (and that of their victim) just a moment before the crime took place.
George Orwell is alive and well and living in Holland, apparently.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 22, 2009
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From Davos: How Al Qaeda Ends
This is a little off the beaten track for me, but it is one of the reasons that people go to Davos - to learn about things they would normally not hear about.
While at Davos, I had the good fortune to meet fellow academic ., who is currently at the National War College in Washington (formerly at Oxford). She is working on a new book, entitled How Al-Qaeda Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton University Press, forthcoming, 2009). What I found fascinating about her work is that she has actually identified specific causes for the demise of terrorist groups. They are:
- Capture or killing of the leader
- Failure to transition to the next generation
- Achievement of the group’s aims
- Transition to a legitimate political process
- Undermining of popular support
- Repression
- Transition from terrorism to other forms of violence
What I found particularly fascinating (and which I didn’t know) is that there is actually a large body of knowledge about how previous terrorist movements have come to an end, which could usefully guide us in forming policy with respect to our handling of Al-Qaeda. As Prof. Kronin says in a recent article:
Major powers regularly relearn a seminal lesson of strategic planning, which is
that embarking on a long war or campaign without both a grounding in previous
experience and a realistic projection of an end state is folly. This is just as
true in response to terrorism as it is with more conventional forms of political
violence. Terrorism is an illegitimate tactic that by its very nature is purposefully
and ruthlessly employed. At the heart of a terrorist’s plan is seizing
and maintaining the initiative. Policymakers who have no concept of a feasible
outcome are unlikely to formulate clear steps to reach it, especially once they
are compelled by the inexorable action/reaction, offense/defense dynamic
that all too often drives terrorism and counterterrorism. Although history does
not repeat itself, ignoring history is the surest way for a state to be manipulated
by the tactic of terrorism.
You can find the article from which this quote was taken (and which is quite thought-provoking in itself) here.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on February 08, 2009
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