Riddle Me This: How Can Distance to Old Providers Go Down By Switching Insurance Plans?
I’m reading this Working Paper by Jon Gruber and Robin McKnight, and am baffled by one of their findings. First, the context:
There is one important outcome that is the current focus of much debate over limited network plans, however: patient access to providers as proxied by distance traveled.
A major concern raised about limited network plans is that it will lead patients to have to travel much further to see their providers. We can address this concern with our data by examining the distance between patients and the providers they do see when they join limited network plans. To do so, we use the distance between the centroid of patient and provider zip codes in our data, for every provider‐patient pair that we observe.
Then they go on to write: “We find that those patients who continue to see their old providers are traveling shorter distances to do so, but that those patients who see new providers are traveling farther” (p. 24).
I believe if Bill O’Reilly were here, he’d say, “You can’t explain that.” Anyone?
(In case it’s not clear: How can it be possible that people who continued to see the same provider as they did before the policy change went into effect, now drive a shorter distance to their provider?)
Four Mises CA Posts
Because my blog was in migration, I held up on posting these. But catching up now:
==> In this post I discuss Barkley Rosser’s attempt to (partially) explain the 1921 recovery on the fiscal stimulus pushed through by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
==> Randians versus Rothbardians. I assume that’s all the click-bait you need.
==> The banking system as a whole can’t lend out reserves, but an individual bank sure can.
==> Preston Manning is frank about carbon taxes and politicians.
Blog Migration
Hey everyone,
I had to move my blog host, which is why things were odd for the last couple of weeks. At this point we think everything is transferred over. Let me know if you notice any quirks, because I’m getting ready to bid adieu to the other host.
Second-Guessing God
I’ve made this point in various ways before: We obviously do not know exactly why God allows certain evil acts to occur, but the answer is certainly NOT going to be, “Oh, you care more about sick children than God does,” or, “God wasn’t paying close enough attention when the Holocaust happened.”
Let me try to crystallize the impudence and ignorance of such second-guessing by picking a very specific act of evil where we do know the full story. Imagine someone confronting God in the following manner:
I really question your motives. If you’re supposed to be omnipotent, then why did you let this totally innocent man–he was a carpenter from Nazareth–get brutally tortured and then murdered? This one wasn’t even close. The guy did nothing but go around teaching people and helping them recover from illnesses. But because he spoke truth to power, the authorities had him killed. How you can sit back and let that happen just proves you have a sick sense of justice. Christopher Hitchens was right.
Now if you don’t believe anything like the God of the Christian Bible exists, fair enough, this post may strike you as irrelevant. But many atheists (including Hitchens) go further than that, and argue that even on its own terms, Christianity is monstrous. There are famous arguments contrasting God’s omnipotence with His benevolence.
So in response to those types of immanent critiques, I offer the above thought experiment. The Christian is able to reply very specifically on this, the worst of all injustices in human history. The answer is much more than simply saying, “Well God wanted free will” or “Adam and Eve brought sin into the world.”
No, on this particular act of evil, God could say, “Of course this was a horrible act. My understanding and moral code are infinitely more developed than yours. But given the structure of the universe–which I designed for quite specific reasons–this was a necessary event in order to save humanity from itself.”
To repeat, if you want to throw out the whole gospel as a string of tall tales, OK. But on its own terms, Christianity has a very good answer for why God allowed the worst act of evil ever. I am confident that He has good reasons for every other act of evil as well.
Tom Woods Confesses to His Listeners
There are a lot of things you will learn in this episode of the Tom Woods Show:
(1) He is a good dad.
(2) He is a workaholic.
(3) “Contra Krugman” will launch in April. Let’s hope Krugman is still a Keynesian!
U.S. Monetary History Bask
Hey kids, sorry to ask this, but Scott Sumner is getting uppity and I really need the monthly M2 figures for the U.S. in the period of 1919 – 1922. I don’t need the figures for every single month in that span, but it would be great to know the peaks and troughs.
Does anybody have Friedman and Schwartz handy and want to type in 8 or so important data points? (If you can find it online that would be even better of course, but I’m just seeing annual averages.)
Murphy Plugs *Understanding Bitcoin* and Tom Woods’ *Real Dissent*
Here’s the link to the Bitcoin website, and here’s the link to Tom’s new book that helps me buy Christmas presents.
Potpourri
==> I am late in announcing this blogger Scott Alexander, but he is fantastic. (A bunch of econ bloggers were praising him about a month ago.) He is very sharp but beyond that he illustrates his points with numerous links to show he’s not attacking a strawman (or woman). For example, here he talks about the dangers of relying on one study that “debunks” another; make sure you check out his discussion of the minimum wage debate. But the classic was his long post on social justice. (I think David Friedman was the first guy to link to Alexander, at least in my travels in the geeconosphere.)
==> This Roger Farmer post on Real Business Cycle theory is very interesting. I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I linked when this guy took a similar swipe at Krugman, so I might as well showcase his assault on Ed Prescott too. (HT2 Noah Smith)
==> Assuming the feminist website got the story right (I didn’t follow the links), this is pretty astounding. A woman was jailed for not taking adequate care of her fetus, and then in jail the authorities didn’t allow her to take adequate care of her fetus. Furthermore, she is now going to be listed on the child abuse registry, and so won’t be able to continue her job as a nurse which is how she planned on taking care of her child. Sometimes you almost get the sense that the State’s violence doesn’t solve social problems, ya know?
==> I wonder whether the lads being arrested were actually only 12 as the witness claims (and the website repeats uncritically), but in any event there’s no denying that these young people are clearly not a threat, the officers have them under control, and yet a cop runs in and starts punching one of them. In most lines of work, you get in big trouble if you run up and punch a kid.
==> Chip Knappenberger and Pat Michaels quantify the mismatch between the climate models and Nature.
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