Health Care

Why deceptive Medicare marketing may impact the health of older adults

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Association of Health Care Journalists

by Liz Seegert

We’ve all seen those ads where high-pressure sales tactics are used to encourage older adults to sign up for Medicare Advantage plans, plus the seemingly endless telemarketers and robocalls. If you think these marketing approaches have been getting worse over the past few years, you’re right. 

A new issue brief from The Commonwealth Fund found that nearly all people ages 65 and older have received some plan marketing, with three-quarters seeing one or more television or online ads per day. One in three reported receiving seven or more phone calls per week. And these confusing, high-pressure tactics can mean people are enrolling in plans that don’t meet their health needs. The mixed messages can also affect how people view the …

Uncategorized

Why Do Some Countries Stay Poor?

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FEE Stories

Peter Jacobsen

This week for Ask an Economist, I have a question from a reader named Mark. He says,

“I’ve worked with immigrants that recently moved to the US, and workers still living in their native country and working for me remotely.

My experience is that they’re on average, much harder working and more skilled (even in technical fields) than my American colleagues. The foreigners work hard, making no excuses, grateful for the work, and take every opportunity to better themselves. Americans, on the other hand, demand much higher wages, complain about the work, and make little effort to improve themselves.

Since the people from many of these poor countries are better workers, why are their home countries so poor? Immigrants on average start more businesses and do better in the US than US born citizens. With all their skills and ambition, it seems their home countries ought to be significantly richer than the US cities, yet this isn’t the case. What’s the cause of these countries’ poverty?”

Mark asks perhaps the single-most important question in the history of economic thinking. Why do some countries grow rich while others stay poor?

In 1776, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published perhaps the most influential work in the history of political economy: An Inquiry into the …