Maxine's Links for November 8 2009

WSJ: After errors hospital must put video cameras in OR

Operating on the wrong part of a patient is what health wonks call a “never event” — something that should never happen. So what do you do if a hospital has done five wrong-site surgeries since January, 2007?

 Another good example of the market failing to fix something that most economists (and right-wing ideologues) love to assume it will fix. It’s sort of like the bankers who gambled their banks into bankruptcy. Why were they not self-interestedly prudent?  Maxine thinks in this case it’s a combination of Gyges and short-term private gain that is at odds with social benefits, where both are supported by an antiquated business model that evolved with a near reverence for medicine and medical doctors (M.D. does not stand for Minor Deity) that insulates physicians and hospitals from the negative sequelae of their own bad management and bad behavior.

The Economist's Schumpeter on public funding of entrepreneurial endeavor

Last year Israel, a country of just over 7m people, attracted as much venture capital as France and Germany combined. Israel has more start-ups per head than any other country (a total of 3,850, or one for every 1,844 Israelis), and more companies listed on the NASDAQ exchange, a hub for fledgling technology firms, than China and India combined.

Maxine asks: how can we be sure that a public entity or actor will be able to discern the entrepreneurial activity deserving of public funding? How do we prevent it becoming a siphon for taxpayer money to political cronies?  How do we prevent it becoming ossified into entrenched silos and interests that become barriers to new and innovative ideas that may compete with the “financial interests” of the established silos and interests?

Just asking....

Bloomberg: Roubini says bank mergers may create "bigger monster"

Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the financial crisis in 2006, said mergers between U.S. banks may create institutions that pose too great a risk to financial stability.

Nobody listened to him the last time either....

NYT: Nicholas Kristof provides some sound statistics documenting the myths about US healthcare

“I will never forget standing outside the chemo treatment room knowing that the medication needed to save my life was only a few feet away, but that because I had private insurance it wasn’t available to me,” Linda wrote. “I read a comment from someone saying that they didn’t want a faceless government bureaucrat deciding if they would or would not get treatment. Well, a faceless bureaucrat from my private insurance made the decision that I wouldn’t get treatment and that I wasn’t worth saving.”

Maxine is a cancer survivor who didn’t have to fight too much with her private insurance company during that pesky little interlude (she thinks because her insurer was her employer and she had a good employer), but she has been asking this question for a long time: Remind me again why we are so afraid of the guvmint, but not afraid of a “faceless bureaucrat from my private insurance” company? Maxine really wants to understand this.

 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report on inter-country comparisons of health outcomes

                Just in case you think Kristof was making it up.

McClatchy News: Recovery? The 10.2% without job might beg to differ

As bad as Friday's jobs report was, showing October's unemployment rate jumping sharply to 10.2 percent, the outlook is likely to worsen for American workers well into next year. Economists expect the jobless rate to keep climbing, perhaps above 11 percent, as employers produce more with fewer workers and shy away from hiring.

And despite the huge transfer of capital from taxpayers to banks, banks still aren’t lending.

Maxine will  say this one more time: if you want a socialist country, you should keep voting for lawmakers who support policies that keep sticking it to the middle and lower classes. We’re a democracy. We can vote. And eventually, we will want our (larger) piece of (even a shrinking) pie back. A more evenhanded bailout with a better safety net for displaced workers, including access to healthcare and extended unemployment benefits, would have been fairer.  And government-funded jobs creation by rebuilding and creating new public infrastructure is an intergenerational win-win. For God’s sake, this is not rocket science (or even mathemetized and therefore incomprehensible economic theory).

WSJ: Bank Failures hit 120 as United Commercial Bank Fails

 U.S. regulators closed five more banks on Friday, reaching 120 for the year, as souring loans and the lingering effects of last year's financial crisis continued to weigh on the nation's financial institutions.

Calculated Risk reports that US taxpayers lost $299 million when the preferred stock they received in exchange for TARP funds provided to United Commercial Bank were rendered worthless by the failure which will also cost the FDIC an additional $1.4 billion dollars.