{"id":2523,"date":"2009-09-07T10:05:41","date_gmt":"2009-09-07T17:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/09\/07\/our-health-care-problems-are-more-vivid-when-presented-in-colorful-graphical-video-form\/"},"modified":"2009-09-07T10:05:41","modified_gmt":"2009-09-07T17:05:41","slug":"our-health-care-problems-are-more-vivid-when-presented-in-colorful-graphical-video-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/07\/our-health-care-problems-are-more-vivid-when-presented-in-colorful-graphical-video-form\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Health Care Problems Are More Vivid When Presented in Colorful Graphical Video Form"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Talking about <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/09\/05\/what-i-did-on-my-summer-vacation-part-1\/\">health care<\/a> provides a great opportunity to link to <a href=\"http:\/\/mainsequenceblog.com\/2009\/08\/01\/healthcare\/\">this video by Peter Aldhous, Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell<\/a> &#8212; the last of whom was once <a href=\"http:\/\/inversesquare.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/05\/good-work-alert-another-mit-science-writing-grad-student-making-good\/\">Tom Levenson&#8217;s advisee<\/a>.  (Also via <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/bioephemera\/2009\/09\/more_on_health_care_cjr_link_t.php\">Bioephemera<\/a>, who at least was kind enough to embed the video.)<\/p>\n<p>The video, also at <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/dn17512-the-scientific-arguments-for-us-healthcare-reform.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&amp;nsref=online-news\">New Scientist<\/a><\/em>, takes data from studies by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dartmouthatlas.org\/\">Dartmouth<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oecd.org\/home\/0,2987,en_2649_201185_1_1_1_1_1,00.html\">OECD<\/a>, and uses <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gapminder.org\/\">Gapminder<\/a> to make the graphs come alive.  It helps explain one of the paradoxes behind health care in the U.S.:  we spend more than most other developed countries, and we get less for it.  The explanation &#8212; you&#8217;ll be unsurprised to hear &#8212; lies in our <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2007\/12\/13\/change-the-incentive-structure\/\">screwy incentive system<\/a>.  By making health care a matter of profit for various sets of people &#8212; doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies &#8212; we push into the background the incentive that we&#8217;d really like the system to have, namely keeping people healthy.  Changing those incentives doesn&#8217;t mean that Barack Obama decides what treatment you get from your doctor; it just means that we can focus human ingenuity on the task of making people healthier, rather than just making other people wealthier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Talking about health care provides a great opportunity to link to this video by Peter Aldhous, Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell &#8212; the last of whom was once Tom Levenson&#8217;s advisee. (Also via Bioephemera, who at least was kind enough to embed the video.) The video, also at New Scientist, takes data from studies by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}