Health Tips

Best Decade Ever: Sure, the 2000s brought war, terrror, and economic misery. But Reihan Salam sees a magical decade that created peace and prosperity that will be with us for years. (Reihan Salam, 12/31/09, Daily Beast)

The fact that Americans are willing to spend borrowed money on flat-screen televisions and souped-up video game consoles and hybrid electric vehicles has led us to an era of painful deleveraging, one of the things moralistic scolds are quick to condemn about the Big Zero. But this eagerness to buy, buy, buy also helped the country maintain its technological leadership. Economist Amar Bhidé, perhaps the decade’s most underappreciated thinker, has argued that one of the key strengths of the American economy is what he calls “venturesome consumption”—the willingness of consumers to try untested new goods and to invest the time and effort necessary to figure out how to use them. The gadget geeks who always have to have the latest and greatest gadgets help the rest of us by creating a large enough market for innovative products to eventually drive prices down to earth. This is in some respects very risky behavior, a small-scale version of the risks taken by entrepreneurs. The geeks are guinea pigs, after all. Yet it means that inventors across the world are striving to create products that can crack the lucrative American market.

The perfect example of venturesome consumption is, of course, iPhone-mania. At first, the iPhone was a way for people to cram a cell phone, iPod, and datebook in the slender pockets of your skinny jeans. With the advent of applications, it’s become an infinitely expandable device that is much more like a baby computer than a cellphone on steroids. It’s only natural that people are increasingly transitioning from expensive laptops to cheapo netbooks that work on the rare occasions when the iPhone won’t do the job. The iPhone is leading us towards an age of constant connectivity. In the not-too-distant future, your phone, smaller than a fingernail or perhaps a strand of hair, will constantly monitor your vital signs, just in case you’re on the verge of catching a cold. It will even warn you when an ex is around the corner, sparing you an awkward encounter. And without this low dishonorable decade, it would never have happened. Astonishing increases in the quality of the goods we consume like these won’t be captured in crude measurements like GDP, despite the fact that it is a real source of wealth. As grumpy as you might feel on New Year’s Eve, would you really want to go back to the bulky CD players, the lousy supermarkets, and the VHS cassettes of yesteryear? Of course not.

…one can, with a straight face, refer to an economic slowdown that was shorter than a pregnancy as an “era.”

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About 3,000 Medicare patients who’ve been getting care at a Mayo Clinic facility in Arizona will have to pay out of their own pocket or find another doctor.

Starting in 2010 (i.e., next week), the five primary care docs at a Mayo outpost in Glendale, Ariz. will stop accepting Medicare. Patients in the program who choose to stick around will be on the hook for about $1,500 per year, Mayo spokesman Michael Yardley told the Health Blog. The clinic expects that most of the patients will find another place to get their primary care.

“We know it’s been incredibly difficult for our patients,” Yardley said.

Medicare typically pays doctors lower rates than private insurance companies. That makes some docs reluctant to accept Medicare patients, and can sometimes make it hard for Medicare patients to find primary care. Medicare covers about half the cost of a primary care visit at Mayo, while private insurance typically covers the whole cost, according to Yardley.

The new Medicare policy applies only to the Glendale facility, but it eventually could be expanded to other sites where Mayo provides primary care. Hospitalization and specialty care won’t be affected.

Mayo — which has been cited by President Obama as a model of high quality care at a reasonable price — is based in Minnesota (of course), but it also has a pretty big operation in Arizona.

For further reading, see the Arizona Republic and Bloomberg News.

Image: iStockphoto

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