Ecclesia is an inner-city church in Houston. Its heart is in the right place, as reflected by this video.
Yet another in our continuing series of the most creative product on television, commercials.
Dirt Devil-The Exorcist from MrPrice2U on Vimeo.
One of the most interesting issues in the health care finance debate is whether a consumer should be able to shift at least a portion of the cost of a placebo to a broad base of insureds. As The Economist notes, placebos are big business and – in some cases – just as effective as the real thing:
Alternative medicine is big business. Since it is largely unregulated, reliable statistics are hard to come by. The market in Britain alone, however, is believed to be worth around ¬£210m ($340m), with one in five adults thought to be consumers, and some treatments (particularly homeopathy) available from the National Health Service. Around the world, according to an estimate made in 2008, the industry’s value is about $60 billion.
Over the years Dr [Edzard] Ernst and his group have run clinical trials and published over 160 meta-analyses of other studies. (Meta-analysis is a statistical technique for extracting information from lots of small trials that are not, by themselves, statistically reliable.) His findings are stark.
According to his “Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine”, around 95% of the treatments he and his colleagues examined–in fields as diverse as acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy and reflexology–are statistically indistinguishable from placebo treatments. In only 5% of cases was there either a clear benefit above and beyond a placebo (there is, for instance, evidence suggesting that St John’s Wort, a herbal remedy, can help with mild depression), or even just a hint that something interesting was happening to suggest that further research might be warranted.
Should a portion of your health insurance premiums be used to pay a portion of the cost of a placebo for your co-insured? Or is this an example of the situation in which the third party-payor system simply doesn’t control costs as well as a consumer-payor system?
Steve Allen interviews a painfully shy Bob Dylan almost 50 years ago.
One of the nicest compliments that I have ever received came from from a court clerk who told me that the court staff enjoyed having me in their court because I always came with a smile on my face. Ron Gutman provides good thoughts on smiles to begin the week.
So, the NY Times Joe Nocera (as well as Henry Blodget) think that the investment bankers scammed LinkedIn’s owners in favor of the investment bankers other customers.
Grand conspiracy theories – as well as criminal prosecutions – certainly have been hatched with less.
But as the Epicurean Dealmaker lucidly explains (also here), morality plays and conspiracy theories are hard to piece together given the wide variety of forces that are in play when owners of a company tap the public markets with a piece of their company. Heck, LinkedIn’s shares are trading at a massive multiple to what they traded for recently in private in secondary markets.
The instinct of most politicians and much of the mainstream media is to embrace simple “villain and victim” morality plays when attempting to explain a particular outcome in which someone gained at the expense of someone else.
Take, for example, investment loss. The more nuanced story about the financial decisions that underlie a failed investment strategy doesn’t garner sufficient votes or sell enough newspapers to generate much interest from the demagogues or muckrakers. That’s why we periodically endure witch hunts — such as demonizing speculators – when it’s unquestionable that speculation in markets has a beneficial purpose.
Morality plays are comforting because they make it easy to identify and demonize the villains who are supposedly responsible for trouble. The truth is usually far more nuanced and complicated, but ultimately more rewarding to embrace.
As regular readers know, I have long thought that Timothy Geithner is in over his head as Treasury Secretary.
So, it stands to reason that many people continue to listen carefully to what he says, this time at the opening of the new HBO film based on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book about the most recent financial crisis, Too Big to Fail.
“You can’t prevent people from making mistakes,” observed Geithner philosophically. “Taking too much risk and making stupid mistakes may not be a crime.”
Yeah, right. Try to persuade Jeff Skilling of that.
The reality is that there isn’t much difference between the way in which Geithner and Skilling reacted to their respective crisis. Yet one remains in one of the most powerful positions in government, while the other wastes away in a prison cell.
There is simply no rational basis for the disparate treatment of these two men.