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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

Please be aware that the source, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is a think-tank and not a journal or research institute. This does not mean the work or conclusions are invalid, but it does mean the authors likely have an agenda.

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I picked this study up from Mark Thoma's blog. FWIW, Dean Baker (founder of the CEPR and author of the paper here) has a well-established record as an economist and his credentials can be looked up.

I'm not sure what your implication is, though. Are you afraid of a liberal bias, conservative bias, pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist bias?

If I posted a paper from the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, I doubt that you would consider the "journal" part to be a consolation.

This paper seems to be directly targeting doctors specifically and is leveraging resentment against the 1% for doing so.

The author (Dean Baker) is a supporter of ACA. Maybe this is some sort of attempt at fomenting support for bringing down doctors' wages in order to help bring down the costs of ACA.

Based on what they say you are probably right. They first say some things that are true but then give completely unjustified explanations about the medical profession. The regulation of the medical profession and the health market also exists in most European countries, even in Poland for example where doctors are not paid well. But somehow he attributes the high cost of care in USA on the high degree of regulation which is in most Western countries... Americans also pay more for drugs, nurses, and insurance. Hospital CEOs and administrative staff in US also gets paid considerably more. As a foreigner in USA with experience in the field, I would say that they are doing a pretty good job to make sure that the doctors that get to practice medicine in USA have passed through multiple filtering by ensuring that even the worst doctor is in a good enough level. If you want to have cheaper care at any cost, I think you could do it but there will be a price to pay. Medical travel is a viable option but then if things do not go well is your life valued according to Indian or American standards. In other words how much coverage do you get from their malpractice insurance. The medical profession is already very stressful and most young doctors feel that they are not well compensated for their long education, 8 years of student loans, training and skills on top of basically being converted to bureaucrats that their practice is ruled by compensation agreements (do not spend more than x time for each patient). Most doctors are smart and very few are "missionaries". If the medical profession keeps becoming less attractive you are just going to end up with less smart doctors and more smart programmers/engineers/finance/e.t.c. There are choices to be made...

Are there any authors who don't have an agenda?

No, but there are authors who attempt to avoid an agenda, and authors who attempt to advance one. It's an important distinction.

I'd be more scared of the former since they have self-deluded themselves into believing themselves more objective. This will lead to all sorts of strange contortions to maintain the author's impossible self-image.

Attempting to be fair and objective isn't a delusion, it's an effort. Similarly, I try to be kind to people, but sometimes I'll get a little irritated — this doesn't mean I'm deluded into thinking I'm perfectly kind, and it also doesn't mean I'm just as mean as somebody who revels in other people's pain.

Put another way: Just because no software is 100% error-free doesn't mean it's better to go with software that has had no QA whatsoever and is known to be very buggy.

It can also lead to attempts to actually be more objective. Remember, you're contrasting them to authors who attempt to advance an agenda, and are almost certainly therefore deliberately being less objective.

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