ES EN
Menu Menú

Publications

Publicaciones

Search Publications

Buscar publicaciones

Filters Filtro de búsqueda

to a

clear selection Quitar los filtros

none

Article Artículo

Affordable Care Act

Robert Samuelson Doesn't Think Diagnosing Diseases and Treatment Affect Outcomes: Shilling for Republicans and the Rich

You know the person who commits murder and the dead person really are both victims in Robert Samuelson land. His latest column on health care shows his great expertise in obscuring everything he touches to say it's all just so complicated.

He tells readers:

"Still, there’s no moral high ground. Some Democrats have wrongly accused Obamacare opponents of murder. This is over-the-top rhetoric that discourages honest debate. It’s also inconsistent with research. Kaiser reviewed 108 studies of the ACA’s impact and found that, though beneficiaries used more health care, the 'effects on health outcomes' are unclear."

Yes, Kaiser was being very careful in its comments. The Affordable Care Act has been in effect for three and a half years. There is a lag between research and publication, that means that at this point in time we still have limited solid measurements of outcome measures. We do have data on diagnoses and treatment.

The study reports:

"Many expansion studies point to improvements across a wide range of measures of access to care as well as utilization of some medications and services, including behavioral health care services. Some research shows that improved access to care and utilization is leading to increases in diagnoses of certain chronic conditions and in the number of adults receiving consistent care for a chronic condition."

So we have evidence now that people with conditions like heart disease and cancer are being diagnosed earlier and getting treatment. We are not going to have good data on mortality rates at this point since the vast majority of people with heart disease and cancer do not die immediately from these conditions. But, if we make the huge leap that treatment might affect survival, then we can infer that the ACA is keeping people from dying.

But hey, we want to be cautious, unlike those irresponsible Democrats who are accusing the Republicans of murder. After all, it is possible that all the money we spend on treating heart disease and cancer is totally worthless.

CEPR / July 24, 2017

Article Artículo

Disability

Washington Post Shoots for Pulitzer in Fake News With Reporting on Disability

The Washington Post has been running a multi-part series on the country's disability programs. The premise, as stated in the most recent installment, is that we are seeing:

"...decades-long surge in the nation’s disability rolls."

The formula then involves profiling one or more families who depend on disability payments from the government instead of work for their primary source of income. Usually, the profiles show family members to be reluctant to work and to have drug problems and other unhealthy habits.

While this situation undoubtedly describes a substantial number of people in the United States, the idea that the number of people getting disability payments is exploding is a Washington Post invention, not a fact in the real world. The graph below shows disability payments as a share of GDP from 1980 to 2013.

Book4 18176 image001

Source: OECD.

While the share of GDP going to disability payments did rise over this 33 year period, the increase was just over 0.3 percentage points, a rise of 30 percent. Furthermore, Social Security disability payments, the largest component of this spending, has fallen by 0.07 percentage points of GDP over the years from 2013 to 2016, leaving an increase of less than 25 percent measured as a share of GDP over 46 years. (The Social Security Trustees project payments as a share of GDP will fall somewhat more this year.)

CEPR / July 21, 2017

Article Artículo

Is Amazon’s Stock Price Justified? What It Means If It Is

Back in the 1990s stock bubble it was common for analysts to say things like price-to-earnings ratios (PE) no longer mattered. They were right, at least for a while, as the stock valuations of companies like AOL and Priceline soared way beyond anything that could conceivably be justified by current or future earnings.

Of course after a while, price-to-earnings did come to matter, as the stock market lost half its value from its peak in March of 2000 to its trough in the summer of 2002. The tech heavy Nasdaq lost close to 80 percent of its value. Many of the big tech enthusiasts were wiped out in this crash. While it might seem old-fashioned, people presumably value stock based on how much earnings a share commands, not the beauty of the stock certificate or how cool the company is.

With this in mind, it is interesting to think about what the Amazon future might look like given that it now has a market capitalization of roughly $480 billion with current profits of roughly $2.6 billion. This gives it a price-to-earnings ratio of 184 to 1.

Dean Baker and Brian Dew / July 19, 2017