Politics Roundtable

Here, from the CBC New Brunswick website, is a story which is, sadly, a pretty familiar one as far as Canadian health system stories go.

It's dated Tuesday, February 6, 2007, and headed

Bed shortage delayed 20 surgeries at hospital in January

The ...

Here's a story from the CTV website which is a bit of a twist on the long running "we could solve out doctor shortage problem if we'd only recognize the credentials of foreign trained doctors" theme.

The foreign doctors in this case are Brits:

The ...

You wouldn't know it from much of the coverage, but George W. Bush's 2007 State of the Union speech included two health care proposals. The one that got most of the attention was the one dealing with the tax treatment of health insurance premiums. I'll discuss that one ...

At least if you live in a market society. Consider, for example, this Miami Herald article (free registration required) on organic foods.

It's dated 3 Jan/07, written by Susan Salisbury, and headed:

S. Florida farmers see a fresh profit in organics

In ...

What some might refer to as a tendency to harp on about a handful of themes, I regard as taking delight in pointing out how much of what we read in the newspapers can be explained in terms of basic introductory economic theory. In this case, we're back to ...

Did you ever run into a news story on a scientific breakthrough which you really, really, really, really, really, really hoped would live up to its initial hype, just because it sounded so cool? Well, if not, The Scotsman newspaper has a story which may ...

The Feb. 11, 2007 Sunday New York Times had an article ($$$ subscription required soon) that's worth taking a look at for what it says about the whole pharmaceutical development process.

You've probably seen the figures which suggest that it costs about $800 million to bring ...

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel picks up an AP report out of Venezuela which makes one wonder if there mightn't have been some bit of economic theory, or perhaps one or two bits of historical evidence, which might not have predicted, or at least hinted at, this: ...

It's very reassuring when a paper like the New York Times runs a story which not only gets the economics right, but implicitly accepts the economic analysis as being the way the world works. Perhaps the NYT's not doing it consciously; perhaps sometimes it just fits so ...

Unusually, I find myself in agreement both with Canada's federal Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty and with a New Brunswick poverty activist. That's not an impossibility, of course, and how statistically improbable it is depends on how you define the event in question - the probability of my ...