[extropy-chat] Failure of low-fat diet

[Robin Hanson]

At 10:48 PM 2/24/2006, Hal Finney wrote:
>Back to incentives: when not shoring up the foundations of quantum
>mechanics or lending transparency to the murk of Middle Eastern politics,
>Robin dabbles in health care economics, and one of his first papers on
>that subject has a solution for this problem.  "Buy Health, Not Health
>Care," <http://hanson.gmu.edu/buyhealth.html>, talks about getting life
>insurance companies to pay for health care.  Since they have an economic
>incentive to keep you alive, their incentives are aligned with yours.
>And they would develop the expertise to know what works and what doesn't.
>To use the analogy above, they do "go down with the plane", in the sense
>that they pay out a huge amount every time a patient dies.
>Something along these lines might go a long way towards fixing this
>stubborn problem of 20% fatal misdiagnoses.  I'd be curious to know what
>further ideas Robin has on this since his 1994 paper.

Before you try to fix something, it is a good idea to have some idea 
how it works
and what its function is.   This is especially good advice for social 
institutions.
If you think that education is about learning things, you will find 
the existing
school institutions lacking and suggest fixes that should result in 
more learning.
If education is primarily about finding and molding people to work in boring
bureaucratic  jobs, you will be disappointed to find little interest 
in your suggestions.

I wrote that paper when I had the ordinary person's concept of medicine - that
medicine is like car repair, and everyone is mainly concerned about figuring
out the problem and fixing it.   That simple model however just doesn't hold up
well under closer examination.   Oh, I could argue that medicine *should* be
about fixing our broken health, but that theory just doesn't account very well
for the patterns of behavior we see surrounding medicine.

So I am at the point of trying to figure out what functions medicine 
does provide
for people.  Their lack of interest in my suggestion is just one data 
point among
the many I puzzle over.  One attempt of mine is: 
http://hanson.gmu.edu/showcare.pdf



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323