BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS AND HEALTH CARE.

Speaking of the CBO, here's a fascinating post from its director, Peter Orszag

I spoke today at the 10th anniversary of the Center for Health Policy (CHP) and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) at Stanford University. (Here are the slides from the talk.) My remarks touched upon a theme that I will be discussing in more detail in other lectures later this fall: that just as the field of economics suffered because it mostly ignored psychology for too long, so too much of medical science and health policy has been largely ignoring the crucial role of expectations, beliefs, and norms. Perhaps the most compelling example involves the placebo effect, which tends to be dismissed as a statistical annoyance rather than examined in and of itself as a powerful force — often more potent empirically than the ‘medical’ intervention formally being studied.

I'd like to hear him say more about that. We get some bullet points in the slides:

• Boost demand for efficiency by increasing the salience of health care costs (for example, making the full cost of insurance more evident to enrollees) •Improve information about cost-effectiveness (necessary but not sufficient) and align incentives •Shift behavioral norms among health care providers toward more effective, lower-cost, evidence-based care • Set cost-effective defaults for both enrollees and health care providers

But I want more! Maybe it's the type of thing he could post to his, err, blog.