A while ago, I criticized a new paper on the supremacy of the U.S. healthcare system that was being touted by Gary Becker and Greg Mankiw. The paper, by Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that mortality trends for prostate and breast cancer were much better in the U.S. than in other advanced countries. My main beef was that Preston and Ho's research design was too blunt to really pick up on why this was the case. But I see that an updated NBER version of the paper has more details on what could be behind the better U.S. outcomes.

On prostate cancer:

Declines in prostate cancer mortality have been attributed to both PSA screening and improvements in treatment ... An individual-level population model that used counterfactuals to simulate US mortality and incidence of advanced-stage prostate cancer concluded that two-thirds of the decline in mortality between 1990 and 1999, and 80% of the decline in distant-stage incidence, was attributable to expanded PSA testing (Etzioni et al. 2008).

is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

A colleague received the following fundraising letter from an organization I had not previously encountered: the Independent Women’s Forum. The letter says:

Dear —-/

More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama's nationalized healthcare onslaught.

It's as simple as that...

Last week, the White House released a list of recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the United States government can afford a civilian. Among the 16 awardees are truly great figures: breast cancer philanthropist Nancy Goodman Brinker, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.