We have all heard about medical tourism to India, Singapore or Thailand, places where patients can enjoy high quality and low prices. But do you know about medical tourism to the United States? By some estimates, around 400,000 people travel to the United States for medical treatment every year and the big surprise is that for tourists U.S. health care prices can be very low! Canadians coming to the United States can get a knee replacement for less than half of what Americans pay and at a price not much more than they would pay in India. I learned this from John Goodman’s very interesting new book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis (this is an Independent Institute book where I am director of research).
Consumers Are Ready to Adopt Mobile Health Faster than the Health Industry is Prepared to Adapt, Finds PwC Study on Global mHealth Adoption
Widespread adoption of mobile technology in healthcare, or mHealth, is now viewed as inevitable in both developed and emerging markets around the world, but the pace of adoption will likely be led by emerging markets and lag consumer demand, according to a new global study conducted for PwC Global Healthcare by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
The ground breaking study, Emerging mHealth: paths for growth, found that consumers have high expectations for mHealth, particularly in developing economies as mobile cellular subscriptions there become ubiquitous. In emerging markets, consumers perceive mHealth as a way to increase access to healthcare while patients in developed markets see it as a way to improve the convenience, cost and quality of healthcare.
According to PwC, if the promise of mHealth is realized by consumers, the impact on healthcare delivery could be significant and fundamentally alter traditional relationships within the healthcare industry. The use of mHealth and speed of adoption will be determined in each country by stakeholders’ response to mHealth as a disruptive innovation to overcome structural impediments and align interests around patients’ needs and expectations.
My Question for Wisconsin’s US Senate Candidates: Tammy Baldwin, Jeff Fitzgerald, Eric Hovde, Mark Neumann and Tommy Thompson
The National Security Agency said this week that it would violate our privacy to say how many Americans have been spied upon.
Warrant less wiretapping (FISA) just passed the House. President Obama’s kill list includes Americans and courageously, Rand Paul wants warrants before drones can take our photo.
If elected, will you vote to uphold our constitutional right to due process?
Candidate websites: Tammy Baldwin, Jeff Fitzgerald, Eric Hovde, Mark Neumann and Tommy Thompson
What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?
The fence that divides the city of Nogales is part of a natural experiment in organizing human societies. North of the fence lies the American city of Nogales, Arizona; south of it lies the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora. On the American side, average income and life expectancy are higher, crime and corruption are lower, health and roads are better, and elections are more democratic. Yet the geographic environment is identical on both sides of the fence, and the ethnic makeup of the human population is similar. The reasons for those differences between the two Nogaleses are the differences between the current political and economic institutions of the US and Mexico.
This example, which introduces Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, illustrates on a small scale the book’s subject.* Power, prosperity, and poverty vary greatly around the world. Norway, the world’s richest country, is 496 times richer than Burundi, the world’s poorest country (average per capita incomes $84,290 and $170 respectively, according to the World Bank). Why? That’s a central question of economics.
Strategy Tax (1): Microsoft Burns the Ships(2); Apple’s Latest Software Supports a 2009 iPhone
Microsoft and Apple are thinking different on mobile strategy.
For decades, Microsoft expended considerable treasure and time to insure that old software ran on the latest Windows release. This meant that Windows carried a substantial amount of baggage, symptoms of which include slow boot times and the need to periodically wipe a hard drive and re-install the operating system.
Apple, on the other hand, has a long, well earned reputation for killing off products, software and peripherals largely in an effort to use the latest and greatest technologies – and create superior software experiences. Apple historically minimized the amount of baggage in new software releases. Their current operating system (10.7) eliminated support for PowerPC (Apple’s former cpu architecture, pre-Intel) software and therefore hardware of a certain vintage.
Microsoft, in a splashy Los Angeles event, ditches their long time hardware partners such as Dell and HP for what appears to be a home-grown tablet computer. They call it “surface”. Horace Dediu takes a look at the economic and strategy implications, which are not insignificant, of this announcement. 
The next day, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Windows 8 Phone software will not support current phones. More ships burning, including Nokia.
Just last week, Apple announced the 6th major release of their iPhone and iPad operating system, known as iOS 6. Interestingly, the 3 year old iPhone 3GS (photo above) continues to be mostly supported. Apple notes that “not all features are available on all devices”.
It appear that Apple is attempting to address different smartphone price points using the 3GS (2009), 4 (2010), 4s (2011) and the looming 5th generation phone (2012).
The image of Microsoft burning the ships, that is hardware partners along with recent and significantly hyped smartphones is quite a contrast to Apple. Apple’s strategy appears to be ecosystem über alles.
Apple’s ecosystem includes iCloud, Siri, iTunes and the App Store.
What might the strategy tax be for both players?
Links: 1. Strategy Tax and 2. Burning the Ships.
Cringely takes a look at Microsoft’s announcement, as well.
What Facebook Knows: The company’s social scientists are hunting for insights about human behavior. What they find could give Facebook new ways to cash in on our data—and remake our view of society.
Heading Facebook’s effort to figure out what can be learned from all our data is Cameron Marlow, a tall 35-year-old who until recently sat a few feet away from Zuckerberg. The group Marlow runs has escaped the public attention that dogs Facebook’s founders and the more headline-grabbing features of its business. Known internally as the Data Science Team, it is a kind of Bell Labs for the social-networking age. The group has 12 researchers—but is expected to double in size this year. They apply math, programming skills, and social science to mine our data for insights that they hope will advance Facebook’s business and social science at large. Whereas other analysts at the company focus on information related to specific online activities, Marlow’s team can swim in practically the entire ocean of personal data that Facebook maintains. Of all the people at Facebook, perhaps even including the company’s leaders, these researchers have the best chance of discovering what can really be learned when so much personal information is compiled in one place.
Facebook has all this information because it has found ingenious ways to collect data as people socialize. Users fill out profiles with their age, gender, and e-mail address; some people also give additional details, such as their relationship status and mobile-phone number. A redesign last fall introduced profile pages in the form of time lines that invite people to add historical information such as places they have lived and worked. Messages and photos shared on the site are often tagged with a precise location, and in the last two years Facebook has begun to track activity elsewhere on the Internet, using an addictive invention called the “Like” button. It appears on apps and websites outside Facebook and allows people to indicate with a click that they are interested in a brand, product, or piece of digital content. Since last fall, Facebook has also been able to collect data on users’ online lives beyond its borders automatically: in certain apps or websites, when users listen to a song or read a news article, the information is passed along to Facebook, even if no one clicks “Like.” Within the feature’s first five months, Facebook catalogued more than five billion instances of people listening to songs online. Combine that kind of information with a map of the social connections Facebook’s users make on the site, and you have an incredibly rich record of their lives and interactions.
Former FDIC Chair to Lead Systemic Risk Council, Monitor Financial Regulation
The Systemic Risk Council, a private sector, volunteer group led by former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chair Sheila Bair, will convene this month to monitor and encourage regulatory reform of U.S. capital markets focused on systemic risk. The independent, non-partisan council was formed by CFA Institute, the global association of investment professionals that sets the standard for professional excellence and The Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent nonprofit organization that brings a rigorous, analytical approach to solving today’s most challenging problems. The Systemic Risk Council is comprised of a diverse group of experts in investments, capital markets and securities regulation, including senior advisor Paul Volcker, former Chair of the Federal Reserve.
Fascinating.
The secret world of health-care pricing
Gregory Warner: It’s called the Relative Value Update Committee, but everyone knows it as the RUC. It’s a committee of the AMA. It meets every four months in a hotel conference room. And right here — this being a radio story — is where I’d play you the sound of one of those meetings. You might hear heated debates between some three dozen doctors over which procedures should be worth and which ones Medicare should pay higher prices for.
But I can’t play you that sound because RUC meetings are invitation only. Observers are sworn to secrecy. Even the names of the doctors on this private committee were — until recently — kept confidential. For those who have been before the RUC, it’s a powerful experience.
Tales of the Unexpected
For almost a century, the world of economics and finance has been dominated by randomness. Much of modern economic theory describes behaviour by a random walk, whether financial behaviour such as asset prices (Cochrane (2001)) or economic behaviour such as consumption (Hall (1978)). Much of modern econometric theory is likewise underpinned by the assumption of randomness in variables and estimated error terms (Hayashi (2000)).
But as Nassim Taleb reminded us, it is possible to be Fooled by Randomness (Taleb (2001)). For Taleb, the origin of this mistake was the ubiquity in economics and finance of a particular way of describing the distribution of possible real world outcomes. For non-nerds, this distribution is often called the bell-curve. For nerds, it is the normal distribution. For nerds who like to show-off, the distribution is Gaussian.
The normal distribution provides a beguilingly simple description of the world. Outcomes lie symmetrically around the mean, with a probability that steadily decays. It is well-known that repeated games of chance deliver random outcomes in line with this distribution: tosses of a fair coin, sampling of coloured balls from a jam-jar, bets on a lottery number, games of paper/scissors/stone. Or have you been fooled by randomness?
In 2005, Takashi Hashiyama faced a dilemma. As CEO of Japanese electronics corporation
Maspro Denkoh, he was selling the company’s collection of Impressionist paintings, including pieces by Ce?zanne and van Gogh. But he was undecided between the two leading houses vying to host the auction, Christie’s and Sotheby’s. He left the decision to chance: the two houses would engage in a winner-takes-all game of paper/scissors/stone.
Recognising it as a game of chance, Sotheby’s randomly played “paper”. Christie’s took a different tack. They employed two strategic game-theorists – the 11-year old twin daughters of their international director Nicholas Maclean. The girls played “scissors”. This was no random choice. Knowing “stone” was the most obvious move, the girls expected their opponents to play “paper”. “Scissors” earned Christie’s millions of dollars in commission.
The Scene: Madison, Saturday, 9 June 2012
