Health Podcasts

Steven Lipstein, President and CEO of BJC HealthCare--a $3 billion hospital system in St. Louis, Missouri--talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the economics of hospitals. They discuss pricing, the advantages and disadvantages of specialization in modern medical care, and culture and governance of non-profit hospitals vs. for-profit hospitals. At the end they talk about the positives and negatives of a national health board patterned after the Federal Reserve.

Arnold Kling of EconLog talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the death of his father and the lessons to be learned for how hospitals treat patients and our health care system treats hospitals.

Robin Hanson of George Mason University talks about the phenomenon of signalling--the ways people spend resources to convey information about ourselves to others. It begins with Hanson revisiting his theory from an earlier podcast that we spend too much on medicine because we need to signal our concern for friends and family. The conversation then moves onto apply Hanson's model of signalling to other areas of human behavior. This is a wide-ranging discussion covering not just medicine, but real estate transactions, the wooing of a spouse, the role of education in the job market, parenting, the economics of self-deception, and Robin's argument that we spend too much time on admirable activities.

In this bonus middle-of-the-week podcast, Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about health care costs. Researchers in a New England Journal of Medicine article have estimated that the US could save $209 billion if the US went to a single-payer system like Canada. Is this number reliable? Aaron takes a deeper look at the estimate and discusses the relevance of such estimates for health care policy.

This is a special mid-week podcast. It's a follow-up to an earlier podcast with Arnold Kling that raised the issue of administrative costs and potential savings from going to a single-payer system. It also ties in with recent discussions here at EconTalk about the challenges of accurate measurement in the social sciences. We hope you enjoy it. If not, come back Monday when our regular schedule resumes.

Arnold Kling of EconLog talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the economics of health care and his book, A Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care. Kling discusses whether we get what we pay for when we spend money on health care, why health care isn't like cars, and why health care insurance isn't really insurance. The conversation closes with a discussion of innovation in America's health care system and why America is so unlike everywhere else.

Robin Hanson, of George Mason University, argues that health care is different, but not in the usual ways people claim. He describes a set of paradoxical empirical findings in the study of health care and tries to explain these paradoxes in a unified way. One of his arguments is that the human brain evolved in ways that make it hard for us to be rational about health care. He also discusses using prediction markets as a way of designing health care policy.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times talks with Russ Roberts about media bias, competition between old and new media, global warming, and the role of information as an incentive to provide better health care.

Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks about property rights, drug patents, the FDA, and the ideas in his latest book, Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation from Yale University Press.

Author and journalist Virginia Postrel talks about how business competes for customers using style and beauty, going beyond price and the standard measures of quality. She looks at the role of appearance in our daily lives and the change from earlier times when style and beauty were luxuries accessible only to the wealthy. She also talks about her donation of a kidney to a friend and how that affected the intensity of her feelings about the policies surrounding organ donations.

Russ Roberts talks with Darius Lakdawalla of Rand and the National Bureau of Economic Research on the economics of obesity, how much fatter are Americans and why. How much is due to the spread of fast food vs. the falling price of food and the change in the U.S. workplace?

Russ Roberts talks with Stanford University's John Cogan about what's wrong with America's health care system and how to make it right.

Along the way they discuss economics of health care, the tax treatment of employer-provided insurance, the role of state-mandated insurance requirements and the political economy of health care reform.

Russ Roberts looks at the economics and science of intermittent explosive disorder—violent rage out of proportion to its cause. Was the recent study that discovered this problem good science or unreliable? Was the media coverage of the study accurate? How do state insurance regulations create incentives for intellectual dishonesty?

Russ Roberts and Richard Epstein, law professor at the University of Chicago, discuss the market for kidneys. Should people be allowed to buy and sell kidneys? How might a market for kidneys actually work in practice? Should mercenary motives be allowed to trump altruism? Epstein deals with these questions and more.

Russ Roberts and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University talk about medical malpractice, why insurance premiums vary by state, price gouging by insurance companies, the politics of being a judge and an idea for a new TV show using a tried-and-true formula: American Victim.