[One study] found that immigrants had at least a 20 percent lower overall cancer mortality rate than their American-born counterparts.

Mortality rates from heart disease were about 16 percent lower, for kidney disease 18 percent lower, and for liver cirrhosis 24 percent lower.

This is from The NYT.

By now it is well known that hanging out with healthy peers predicts (causes?) good health, and unhealthy peers predict (cause?) bad health, for instance as it applies to weight and diet. So what might that mean?

Is it, therefore, socially optimal to invest scarce health care resources in the most popular people ― considering the external effects on the health of others? Tyler has references and links.

Fidelity: A 65-year-old couple retiring this year will need $220,000 on average to cover medical expenses.

The highest paid public employee in your state is… [HT: Jason Shafrin]

[E]mployer-sponsored and self-purchased supplemental coverage were associated with annual spending growth rates of 7.17 percent and 7.18 percent, respectively, compared to 6.08 percent for beneficiaries without supplemental coverage. In the first empirical study of the topic, the researchers found significantly higher rates of spending growth in all supplemental insurance categories compared to the category without supplemental insurance, even while controlling for sociodemographic, disease, disability, and health behavior characteristics. Golberstein and his colleagues suggest that policy efforts to restrict the generosity of Medicare supplemental insurance plans, and the anticipated lower levels and lower generosity of employer-sponsored supplemental Medicare coverage for future retirees, could slow the rate of spending growth for Medicare beneficiaries. (Health Affairs)

What do the writers who are obsessing about it mean by “inequality”? They basically mean inequality of income. That would make sense if we all agree that the most important way in which people are unequal is differences in income. But what if that isn’t the case? Almost all of the people who are doing the complaining have chosen professions that earn less income than they could have had. That is, all these professors and editorial writers could have gone to law school or gotten an MBA or done something else that would have earned them more money. Obviously, money isn’t the most important thing in their lives.

The list below shows some other ways in which people are unequal. These things basically can’t be purchased. But if we were really concerned about life’s unfairness, we could compensate those who have less of these attributes and tax those who have more.

Intelligence

Physical health

Mental health

Happiness

Leisure time

Physical attractiveness

Athletic ability

Music ability

Life expectancy

Life is unfair.

On the last item, there has been a persistent gap between the life expectancies of men and women ― across all racial and ethnic groups. We don’t want to lower the life expectancy of women and we don’t know how to raise the life expectancy of men. But a general tax on women to be distributed to men would help redress some of nature’s injustice (see Dwight Lee.) Plus, with this tax there would be very little of the avoidance and evasion behavior we see with the income tax. (Not many people would get a sex change just to avoid paying it.)

To return to college professors, for a moment, they have an enormous amount of time to do whatever they feel like doing. They only have, say, six to nine hours of required work every week (teaching) and even then they have enormous discretion over what they actually do. Plus they have the whole summer off. The term “leisure time” doesn’t really capture what is going on here. Let’s just say they have leisurely jobs. Contrast that with people who have no discretion over how they perform their jobs, who work 40 hours a week or more, who hate their work and who can’t wait to retire. (College professors rarely want to retire.)

If you care a lot about inequality, an argument could be made for taxing college professors and giving the money to people whose work experience is boring, uninteresting, unfulfilling and has no purpose (for them) other than paying their bills.

If you believe Tom Wolfe, the most important thing on the list above is status. In Wolfe’s novels, status is far more important than income ― for almost everybody. What are some indictors of status? Being quoted in major newspapers. Being interviewed on TV. Winning a Nobel Prize. By way of contrast, think of all the people who have never been quoted in any newspaper, who have never been on TV and who have never won any prize. I believe there is far more inequality of status than inequality of income, although I’m not sure how to measure these things.

In any event, if inequality bothers you, think about a special tax on Nobel Prize winners, on TV talk show guests and on people whose names appear in the national news media ― with the proceeds distributed, of course, to people who have no status. Anyone called “counselor” or “esquire” or “doctor” is an obvious candidate for a status tax. Someone called both “professor” and “doctor” ought to be a candidate for double taxation. If the professor/doctor also has an eponymous blog, make that a triple tax!

I definitely would include politicians. In fact, if status is what is most important in life, there should be a special tax on elected officials and a huge tax on whoever is president.

There is a closely related issue. In my line of work I meet an enormous number of people who are frustrated because the world pays no attention to what they think. They have no forum from which to get their ideas in front of everyone else.

But imagine you could be an editorial writer for The New York Times. Better, imagine you could say anything you wanted to say ― ignoring facts and even saying things that are demonstrably untrue. Plus, no matter what you say, you never have to publish a retraction or apologize. Imagine that you could use your column to say mean and nasty things about people you don’t like and you could call them any name The NYT regards as “fit to print.”

Now imagine auctioning off the right to have this job. How much do you think people would be willing to pay? I’ll bet there would be some willing to pay $1 million for the opportunity.

In any event, there should be a special tax on whoever gets this job. A very big tax.

The Obama administration wants something the federal government has never done before: a computer system that connects HHS, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, Homeland Security and perhaps other departments as well. This is a herculean task with unclear benefits. For perspective, consider that the Veterans Administration converted to electronic medical records in 1998 and the VA and the Department of Defense have been unsuccessfully trying to share records ever since. Even though they have spent millions of dollars on the effort, it now appears that the two agencies are abandoning the goal altogether.

Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty…Such policies would generally cost far less to provide than paying the penalty or providing more comprehensive benefits, say benefit-services firms. Some low-benefit plans would cost employers between $40 and $100 monthly per employee, according to benefit firms’ estimates.

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

David Kravets from Wired.

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

The costliest hospital in the nation is in New Jersey and it was bankrupt only a few years ago.

The IRS has requested funding for 1,954 full-time equivalent employees for its Affordable Care Act office in 2014.