There is widespread agreement that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needs reforming. The drug approval process in the United States is too slow, too expensive and too restrictive. The FDA delays the introduction of new drugs for up to 12 years and does not publish standards of safety or effectiveness that any drug can meet to ensure its approval.
This study examines the economic effects of the Dole plan using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, an economic model that has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.
Despite a consensus of the American public that prison inmates should be gainfully employed, most are idle. Their idleness contrasts sharply with the circumstances of their 19th-century counterparts. This study analyzes the American experience of private employment of prisoners and concludes that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Expanding the role of the private sector in prison work would reduce crime, increase economic growth and reduce the burden of the criminal justice system on taxpayers.
Using an economic model published in several peer-reviewed journals – a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model – this study examines the effects of a 17 percent flat tax on the various sectors of the economy, on the income of different income groups and on government revenues.
For every one of us, death is inevitable. Premature death, however, is not. Through some reasonable mix of public and private strategies, we can substantially reduce the chance that we will die before our time.
The Singapore programs provide incentives to reduce consumption and offer protection against extraordinary events and free-rider abuses. The system is efficient and effective, the health status of the people is improving and the national investment in health care is surprisingly low, while hospitals are profitable and physician incomes are relatively high.
Texas, which suffered from a 29 percent increase in the rate of serious crime during the 1980s, is experiencing a dramatic improvement in the 1990s.
Social security programs in most countries, including the United States, follow the model first adopted in Europe: they are financed by mandatory payroll taxes and provide benefits to current retirees. A financial crisis facing these pay-as-you-go systems is approaching rapidly as fertility rates decline and life expectancies increase worldwide.
This study examines the choices private insurers will be able to offer as alternatives to the government-run program if they are given a voucher for the average estimated per-person Medicare cost of $4,848 in 1996.
Unlike most countries in the world today, which finance their social security systems on a pay-as-you-go basis, Singapore requires people to save for their own retirement.
While growth in private-sector health care spending has declined recently, spending on Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the nation's poor, has continued to explode – growing at an average annual rate of 19.1 percent between 1990 and 1994.
Multiculturalism is in vogue today among academicians, politicians and the media. But anthropologists identify cultural diversity as a universal source of social conflict and often as a barrier to economic progress as well as personal freedom.
As currently structured, Medicare pays many small bills which the elderly could easily afford and does not pay the catastrophic expenses that could devastate them financially. Medicare is in need of serious reform.
The vast majority of environmentalists believe that appreciation of the natural world needs to be integrated with human progress. But a vocal, prolific and energetic minority of reactionaries who do not believe there is anything to progress have achieved an influence in environmental matters far disproportionate to their numbers.
Serious crime in the United States exploded during the 1960s and 1970s. It began to level off during the 1980s and has actually declined in the 1990s; however, the rate of serious crime remains three times higher than in 1960.
Billions of dollars are being spent to eliminate trivial risks to health and safety based largely on speculative fears that man-made sources of chemicals and radiation are important causes of human cancer.
A theory held by some scientists is that the depletion of stratospheric ozone is substantial and will grow to alarming levels unless the use of CFCs and some related chemical compounds is eliminated. This theory led to an international treaty requiring that production of CFCs be rapidly phased out in developed countries. However, the theory of large-scale depletion caused by human use of these chemicals is not yet supported by solid scientific evidence.
The minimum wage increase proposed by President Clinton would do little to reduce poverty. Instead, it would cause real hardship for some low-income Americans, the very people it is designed to help.
Previous scholarly studies have demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between political and civil liberty and economic growth. This study surveys legal systems in 167 countries and compares the relationship between law, liberty and economic growth.
Beyond some minimum level, government becomes a net drain on the private sector. When resources are allocated privately, the goal is the highest economic rate of return. When they are allocated by politicians or planners, the goal is the highest political return in the form of votes and campaign contributions.
Everyone from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton seems to agree. Our welfare system is a disaster. It's in desperate need of reform.
The health refonn plan proposed by Senator George Mitchell CD-ME) attempts to increase the number of people with health insurance by offering generous subsidies to induce voluntary compliance. Employer mandates would kick in only if the fraction of people with insurance failed to reach 95 percent in a state by the end of the decade. Reaching that goal is unlikely, however. The reason is that the Mitchell bill would allow people to purchase insurance at community-rated premiums after they get sick – thus encouraging them to go uninsured until an illness occurs.
The Clinton health plan promises to insure the uninsured and to replace existing coverage with more generous health insurance benefits for most people. At the same time, the administration claims that under its plan health care spending would be lower than it would have been without reform, both in the public and private sectors.
President Clinton has offered the nation a dramatic health reform plan that promises universal coverage, benefits as comprehensive as those of Fortune 500 company plans and lower costs. The actual results of the plan, however would be quite different from the promises.
Managed competition would make no sense unless most health care were delivered in health maintenance organizations (HMOs), employing the techniques of managed care. That is why most proponents of managed competition oppose traditional insurance and fee-for-service medicine. They want physicians to become agents of bureaucracies rather than agents of their patients, and they want medical practice to be determined more by computer-generated mandates than by the physician's best judgment.