Bailout Plan – The House Republican Alternative
And Now, Behind Door #2 … Whatever the motivations of the House Republican plan – as distinct from the plan agreed upon by the Republican President, Republican Treasury Secretary, Republican Fed...
View ArticleInsurance Companies Line Up for Treasury Bailout
One of the big stories on Friday and Saturday was the expansion of the Treasury recapitalization program to insurance companies. The Washington Post is acting as if it’s a done deal, while the Times...
View ArticleInsuring Bankers’ Bonuses
Here’s what we know so far about the plans for the US banking system that Tim Geithner will unveil next week. The heart of the scheme will, most likely, be an insurance arrangement, in which the...
View ArticleWhy Bail Out Life Insurers?
That’s the question I woke up with this morning. Sad, isn’t it. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Treasury will soon announce that it will use TARP funds to invest in life insurers, or at...
View ArticleInsurance and Health Insurance
I’ve been meaning to write a post on health insurance ever since hearing Karen Tumulty on Fresh Air. (She was discussing her Time article on underinsurance.) I happen to think that a free market for...
View ArticleThe Problem with Profits
Stephen Carter, one of my best professors at law school and also an accomplished novelist, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post arguing that high corporate profits are a good thing, and as a...
View ArticleYou Do Not Have Health Insurance
Right now, it appears that the biggest barrier to health care reform is people who think that it will hurt them. According to a New York Times poll, “69 percent of respondents in the poll said they...
View ArticleWhat Do the People Want?
To the New York Times’s credit, they asked them. And this is what they found (from the beginning of the article, entitled “New Poll Finds Growing Unease on Health Plan”): President Obama’s ability to...
View ArticleAnother Year, Another Decline in Employer-Based Coverage
Ezra Klein shows the new Census figures on the uninsured. The long-term trend is absolutely clear: employer-based coverage is declining and public coverage is increasing, but not enough to make up the...
View ArticleWhat Is Risk Adjustment?
I think I know what it is, and if I’m right it’s very important to health care reform, but it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. Risk adjustment is the solution to the following problem. Imagine you...
View ArticleDesign or Incompetence, Part Two
Last week I wrote a post about how banks entice customers with promotions and then fail to keep up their end of the bargain, forcing customers to waste their time just getting the bank to do what it...
View ArticleAre Health Insurers Worth Bashing?
This guest post was contributed by Andrzej Kuhl, a colleague of mine from a former life. Andrzej is a management consultant based in Montclair, New Jersey. His company, Kuhl Solutions, helps improve...
View ArticleThe Private Insurance Market
By James Kwak I’m currently in the process of buying long-term care insurance—you know, so my daughter won’t have to take care of me when I’m old. I have a good agent who knows all about the market and...
View ArticleMore on Long-Term Care Insurance
By James Kwak After my previous post on the topic, a friend passed along a recent paper by Jeffrey Brown and Amy Finkelstein in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. I recommend reading it if you are...
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