This NY Times article tells the interesting story of a heartbreaking conflict within a family and the Point Foundation‘s efforts to attempt to mitigate the damage that such conflicts can cause. Check it out.
Bobby Cox Companies, Inc. of Ft. Worth — owner of the Rosa’s Cafe, Taco Villa and Texas Burger chains among its other far-flung assets — bought the assets of Schlotzsky’s franchise deli sandwich company out of bankruptcy yesterday in San Antonio. The purchase price was about $28.5 million. Here are the earlier posts on the Schlotzsky’s bankruptcy case.
When Milton Friedman writes about economic history, people listen. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal ($), Professor Friedman observes the following:
To summarize: After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently); we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion.
The Wall Street Journal has revived its Econoblog series, this time with Cal economics professor Brad DeLong replacing Jon Irons in discussing topics with George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen. The subject today is the Bush Administration’s surprising decision to retain John W. Snow as Treasury Secretary. From this first round, Mr. DeLong looks to be a better choice to serve as Mr. Cowen’s counterpart in this discussion. Check it out.
As these earlier posts reflect, a huge Texas Medical Center rift arose earlier this year between Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital over Baylor’s decision to terminate its 50 year relationship with Methodist and make St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital its primary teaching hospital.
The Baylor-Methodist split has now officially replaced the longstanding acrimony between the world reknowned heart surgeons — Dr. Michael DeBakey of Baylor’s DeBakey Heart Center and Dr. Denton Cooley of St. Luke’s Texas Heart Institute — as the most severe professional turf war in the always tumultuous world of academic medicine in the Medical Center.
The signal for the change in the relative positions of these two heartfelt disputes was the announcement yesterday that Dr. Cooley had appointed a Baylor heart surgeon — Dr. Joseph Coselli — as the chief of adult cardiac surgery at the Texas Heart Institute.
Longtime observers of Medical Center politics expected dogs and cats to live together as best friends before such a development would ever occur.
This development will revitalize the Texas Heart Institute, which used to be one of the nation’s premier heart centers before lagging behind the top national centers over the past decade or so. The appointment also means that the Texas Heart Institute will be led by an unusual management team comprised of doctors from both of the Medical Center’s medical schools, Dr. Coselli from Baylor and Dr. James Willerson from the UT Health Science Center at Houston, who is the institute’s president-elect, medical director, chief of cardiology and director of cardiology research.
Here is the Chronicle story on this development.
The Onion hits home with an insight about public transportation that Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has been taking advantage of for years.
In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, economists John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard and Daniel Kessler make their pitch to make all health insurance tax deductible, not just employer-provided health insurance. This earlier post noted Messrs. Cogan, Hubbard, and Kessler’s earlier proposal on this topic, and it is a simple and common sense component of any overhaul of the American health care finance system. That’s probably why we did not hear either candidate propose it during the just completed Presidential campaign.
Messrs. Cogan, Hubbard, and Kessler note that the discrimination in the tax laws regarding health insurance has the following negative market effect:
The most important effect of tax deductibility would be to reduce unproductive health spending. Under current law, medical care purchased through an employer’s insurance plan is tax-free, while direct medical care purchased by patients must be made with after-tax income. As we and many others have observed, this tax preference has given patients the incentive to purchase care through low-deductible, low-copayment insurance instead of out-of-pocket, which in turn leads to cost-unconsciousness and wasteful medical practices. In addition, the tax preference for insurance creates incentives for the health-care system to rely on gatekeepers rather than deductibles and copayments when it does try to control costs. The cost of gatekeepers are financed out of insurance premiums that are paid with before-tax dollars; deductibles and copayments are paid with after-tax dollars.
On the other hand, Arnold Kling notes that providing a tax deduction for individual health insurance policies may simply change the problem. By allowing individuals to deduct health care expenses, a trend would likely occur toward disintermediation in health insurance — that is, more young and healthy workers will opt out of company-provided health insurance, which will leave businesses covering a relatively high-risk population that cannot afford individual policies.
So, the board of Hewlett-Packard Co. has discussed breaking up the company three different times, but decided to keep it intact, according to CEO Carly Fiorina. Asked at an analysts’ conference in Boston yesterday how the company’s board viewed a breakup, Ms. Fiorina said that each time the HP board discussed a potential breakup, it came to “the same unanimous conclusion” to remain one entity.
If you are interested in why this questions keeps coming up for HP, then read here and here.
Joseph A. Jachimczyk, Harris County’s medical examiner from 1960 to 1995, died Tuesday in Houston. Dr. Jachimczyk had battled hypertension and Parkinson’s Disease for a number of years.
Dr. Jachimczyk was Harris County’s first medical examiner and really built the medical examiner’s office from scratch. He was generally well-regarded among law enforcement officials, although medical examiners are invariably remembered more for their mistakes than their achievements. That was certainly true for Dr. Jachimczyk, who badly blew two sets of autopsies six years apart in the late 1970’s and early 80’s in the Diana Wanstrath case that investigators eventually ignored in solving several murders involved in that case.
A vigil service will be held for Dr. Jachimczyk at 7 PM this evening in the chapel of The Settegast-Kopf Co., 3320 Kirby Drive. A funeral mass will be held at 10 AM Thursday at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, at the corner of Buffalo Speedway and Bellaire.