Three From Ezra

Hasn’t anyone told doctors how inefficient Medicare is?. "The results, I think, will be surprising to people who assume that government programs are both much more generous and much less efficient than private corporations. Medicare is the most accurate payer, with an average accuracy rate of over 96 percent. It has moved aggressively to adopt electronic money transfers, while major insurers like Cigna and Humana are still sending checks. And it rejects more claims than Cigna, Aetna, or really anyone but Anthem. In other words, reality defies the stereotypes."

Bill Gross: Deficit reduction can — and should — wait. " But in an unusual mid-month note to his investors, Gross hammered the “anti-Keynesians” in both parties who believe “that fiscal conservatism equates to job growth.” The truth, he says, is just the opposite. “Fiscal balance alone will not likely produce 20 million jobs over the next decade. The move towards it, in fact, if implemented too quickly, could stultify economic growth.”

Gross goes on to spend some time mocking the “ivory tower theorem” that deficit reduction will convince consumers to spend more now because they’ll worry less about taxes and service cuts later. “I know of no family,” he writes, “who, after watching the Republican candidates’ debate in New Hampshire, went out the next day and bought themselves a flat screen under the assumption that their Medicare entitlements would be cut in future years and the U.S. budget balanced.” That theory belongs “in the trash bin of theses and research aimed more towards academics than a practical remedy to America’s job crisis.”"

What ‘Inside Job’ got wrong. "I finally watched “Inside Job” this weekend. It was an excellent documentary for people who don’t want to understand the financial crisis but want to believe they would’ve seen it coming. Watching it, you’d think that the only people who missed the meltdown were corrupt fools, and the way to spot the next one is to have fewer corrupt fools. But that’s not true. Worse, it’s dangerously untrue. In telling the wrong story about how the financial crisis happened, it misinforms about how to keep it from happening again."