Health insurance inflation, Truthiness, Economics of discrimination, and War (on the rocks)
RWL #365
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! It feels good to be on the other side of running a conference, but the feedback we received so far from this year’s Shaping the Future was all positive. It’s kind of fun to see the students before and after. They are almost always, “Whyyyyy do we have to spend our Friday with a bunch of olds?” as the date approaches, and then afterward they are always jazzed about the people they met and how nice they were. “I was sitting at a table with the CEO of X hospital and she was so nice!” Fall is a busy time for my students - we have another conference with the local chapter of ACHE coming up in a couple of weeks. I think I’ll have an easier time getting the students there. One of the things I don’t think I said as directly as I meant to in last Sunday’s email was actually how amazingly generous people in the industry, especially people who are members of professional organizations like ACHE and HFMA, are to students and young professionals. I really wish I had found an organization like that when I was younger, and someone had explained how to engage with the organization. It’s part of what we try to do with our students here. Young people from the managerial class grow up with this sort of behavior around them, with their parents modeling how to build their networks. Most of my students don’t come from that class, so this is their first chance to learn, and it’s completely foreign to them in the beginning. By the end of their time with us, I hope they have some appreciation of the power of connecting.
On another note, I am totally stoked about my new podcast mic. I hadn’t upgraded my kit in five or six years and finally decided it was time after I heard how much better Tyler Jamison’s mic sounded than mine did during our interview. After some research, I decided to go with the Blue Yeti X. Not only does it look cool (and make me feel much cooler when I am recording), but it is so much more sensitive and has deliciously rich sound capture. If you haven’t checked out Flourishing in the World, what are you waiting on? I’m looking forward to doing my next recording next Friday with Marc Hubbard, the amazing men’s soccer coach for UNH. He’s led his team to national ranks over the last decade and we’re going to talk about the virtue of sport and competition, and of course coaching. Stay tuned!
I’ll be back on Sunday with the essay. As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: WSJ, Health Inflation’s Big Hike This Year, in Charts
Why: Health insurance costs have been growing at about a 7% inflation rate over the last 20 years while the CPI has been in the 2% range. The result is an eye-popping 4X growth in cost.
I was talking to my juniors on Monday about compensation and how some compensation is not in cash. There is a lot of talk about wage stagnation in the American economy, and that is truthy. Cash wages have largely been stagnant (except recently), but overall compensation has been growing if you count the rising costs of benefits - which you have to in order to get an accurate measure of compensation. Workers are being better compensated, but they feel poorer because their compensation is buying less than it used to. Employers would be indifferent between paying workers $17,000 more cash ($23K - $6k is roughly $17K employer contribution), or paying $17,000 for employee health benefits. We’re a little better off if employers buy are health benefits for us because we get them pretax if they do, which is part of why we are locked into this spiral. Most people have no idea how much their employer is paying for their benefits and don’t care. Until, that is, they have to buy the benefits on their own.
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Watch
What: Colbert Report, Truthiness (3 min)
https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-truthiness
Why: I had to add this after using truthy in the Read above. Remarkably prescient (from 2005). We’ve gone down the truthiness path very far in our society. Everyone has their “lived experience” and their own “truth”. I miss the snarky Colbert.
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Listen
What: Conversations with Tyler, Claudia Goldin on the Economics of Inequality (50 min)
Why: Goldin just won the Nobel for Economics. She has studied a variety of issues around discrimination and many other things. She speaks very plainly without a lot of econ jargon, so this is a very interesting interview. From the show notes:
“Claudia joined Tyler to discuss the rise of female billionaires in China, why the US gender earnings gap expanded in recent years, what’s behind falling marriage rates for those without a college degree, why the wage gap flips for Black women versus Black men, theoretical approaches for modeling intersectionality, gender ratios in economics, why she’s skeptical about happiness research, how the New York Times wedding announcement page has evolved, the problems with for-profit education, the value of an Ivy League degree, whether a Coasian solution existed to prevent the Civil War, which Americans were most likely to be anti-immigrant in the 1920s, her forthcoming work on Lanham schools, and more.”
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What: War on the Rocks, TECH, ETHICS, AND THE CITY IN ISRAEL’S LOOMING URBAN BATTLEFIELD (31 min)
https://warontherocks.com/2023/10/tech-ethics-and-the-city-in-israels-looming-urban-battlefield/
Why: WOTR is my go-to national security podcast. Very neutral politically, the podcast gives a matter-of-fact report on all things national security. This pod discusses the impending Israeli response to the Hamas terrorist attacks last week and the challenges the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) will face.