Value Investing World

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Op-Ed: Let’s Get Fundamental - by David Brooks

From last week.

If I were magically given an hour to help Barack Obama prepare for his health care speech next week, the first thing I’d do is ask him to read David Goldhill’s essay, “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in the current issue of The Atlantic. That essay would lift Obama out of the distracting sideshows about this public plan or that cooperative option. It would remind him why he got into this issue in the first place.

Goldhill’s main message is that the American health care system is dysfunctional at the core. He vividly describes how the system hides information, muddies choices, encourages more treatment instead of better care, neglects cheap innovation, inflates costs and unintentionally increases suffering.

The essay is about the real problem: the insane incentives. Goldhill is especially good on the way the voracious health care system soaks up money that could go to education, the environment, economic development and a thousand other priorities. Health care, he writes, “simply keeps gobbling up national resources, seemingly without regard to other societal needs.”

………………..

Related links:

How American Health Care Killed My Father

Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth

THE COST CONUNDRUM

Posted by Joe at 9/10/2009
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Value Investing World is a blog dedicated to promoting the multidisciplinary approach to investing and development of – as Charlie Munger describes it – a latticework of mental models. Although largely focused on linking to investing and economic material it deems of interest, it will also post and link to material from other disciplines that it thinks worth reading or watching.

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  • 2007 and 2009 Interviews with Peter Bevelin
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  • Dr. Peter Drucker: FEEDBACK: KEY TO CONTINUOUS LEARNING
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  • Bill Gates quote from Charlie Rose interview (or, how the world's best companies are built by fanatics)
  • Charlie Munger - USC Law School Commencement - May 13, 2007
  • Charlie and Checklists
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  • The Most Astounding Fact About the Universe

Charlie Munger

  • Poor Charlie's Almanack
  • The Best of Charlie Munger: 1994-2011
  • VIDEO: Charlie Munger - USC Law School Commencement - May 13, 2007
  • NOTES: Charlie Munger - USC Law School Commencement - May 13, 2007
  • Charlie Munger's "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment"

Warren Buffett

  • Warren Buffett's Letters to Berkshire Shareholders
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Ben Franklin

  • Ben Franklin's 13 Virtues
  • Ben Franklin - 3 Essays - The Ephemera; The Whistle; Franklin and the Gout

Benjamin Graham

  • The Papers of Benjamin Graham (PDF)
  • The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham: Selected Writings of the Wall Street Legend (PDF)
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  • Securities in an Insecure World (1963 Speech)

Peter Bevelin

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Howard Marks

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Diversification

  • Warren Buffett on Diversification - 1966
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Checklists

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Expert Performance / Self-Improvement

  • Bill Gates quote from Charlie Rose interview (or, how the world's best companies are built by fanatics)
  • Dr. Peter Drucker: FEEDBACK: KEY TO CONTINUOUS LEARNING
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