It’s Good to Be a Teacher in Wisconsin, and Other Links
The average Milwaukee public-school teacher salary is $56,500. But with benefits, the total package is $100,005.
The rates of back surgery among Medicare beneficiaries range from 1.7 surgeries per 1,000 in the Honolulu area to 10 per 1,000 in Casper, Wyoming. Also, lots of regional variation in elective surgery rates for early-stage breast cancer, knee and hip arthritis, gallstones and other conditions.
Proposal: the healthiest and youngest 20 percent of renal failure patients should be given the best kidneys. The remaining 80 percent of patients would wait longer, and the age difference between kidney donors and recipients would be no more than 15 years. (The New York Times endorses the idea this morning.)
Discrimination against the elderly in the raioning of health care — long a feature of national health insurance in other countries — is coming to the United States.
Milwaukee school teachers are making out like bandits.
Did you guys see the Rand Paul/David Letterman interview where Letterman complained about teachers not being paid enough? It was the dumbest thing ever. Paul tried to respond that they are actually overpaid, but Letterman didn’t get it.
The idea of distributing donated kidneys to the people with the most years of life ahead of them makes sense. This strategy would maximize the years of life saved per kidney. However, medical atheists will probably cry foul since, by design, this means giving younger people higher priority than older people.