Beautiful!

Gimme Shelter..

And this is also from the same group.. Fantastic.

Capitalism and Healthcare

Great article with an anecdotal example of what drives the medical industry in a capitalistic environment and why this can result in more expensive and relatively poor care. Its mostly marketing!

A medical technology company is going public to generate the money it needs to advertise its products to hospital directors and insurance-company reimbursement officers. This entails significant extra expenditures for marketing, the new stocks issued to fund the marketing will ultimately have to pay dividends, banks will have to be paid to supervise the IPO that was needed to generate the funds to finance the marketing campaign (presumably charging the industry-cartel standard 7%)...and all this will have to be paid for by driving up the price the company charges to deliver its technologies. But beyond the added expense, why would anyone think that a system in which marketing plays such a large role is likely to be more effective, to lead to better treatment, than the kind of process of expert review that governs grant awards at NIH or publishing decisions at peer-reviewed journals? Why do we think that a system in which ads for Claritin are all over the subways will generate better overall health results than one where a national review board determines whether Claritin delivers treatment outcomes for some populations sufficiently superior to justify its added expense over similar generics? What do we expect from a system in which, as ProPublica reports today, body imaging companies hire telemarketers to sell random people CT scans over the phone?

Also,

The other key thing to pay attention to is who this marketing campaign was targeted at: key decision makers at providers and insurance companies. Those are the people who decide whether medical procedures get ordered. It's not patients. Patients aren't going to experience a loss of freedom or satisfaction because an expert reviewer at the Independant Payment Advisory Board makes the call as to whether a procedure is medically beneficial, rather than the corresponding bureaucrat at their insurance provider or at the for-profit clinic they're attending. Health care is different from buying shoes. Which is why it wouldn't be at all surprising if a board of 15 experts could play a major role in reducing expenses and improving care outcomes in the American medical industry.

Good read. [h/t Paul Krugman]

Return of the Oligarchy!

The chart shows the income share of the Top 5% in the United States from 1913 to 2008. Generated from this excellent and free income database site. As you can see, the income share of the rich was pretty high before and during the Great Depression. Then it tanked after the signing of the New Deal in direct response to the depression. It stayed even during the better part of the New Deal Era when the American middle class has its greatest growth. Then it started climbing again back to the those old levels when the New Deal policies were slowly dismantled.