The Naked Economics of Incentives and Health Care

Effective health care policy is all about changing incentives... and the current system is set up to incentivize more expensive care according to Charles Wheelan.

Wheelan compares the U.S. health care system to the mortgage crisis, talks about where the incentives to actually be healthy could be placed and explores the behavioral economic factors that may give doctors good reasons to order bad procedures.

Wheelan is a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and writes "The Naked Economist" column for Yahoo! Finance.

LISTEN: CHARLES WHEELAN - BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS & HEALTH CARE

Explaining Your Mistakes

The human brain is an amazing machine. The organ allows us to breathe, digest and -- after some practice -- engage in complicated procedures like driving a car without giving it much active thought. The trade-off for the operation of your amazing brain is that some seemingly illogical anomalies pop up. We call those anomalies mistakes.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joseph Hallinan has examined the neurological and psychological factors that play a role in our mistake-making. In his book WHY WE MAKE MISTAKES, Hallinan reveals that we make mistakes because, sometimes we can't help it and other times because we'd rather make a mistake than accept the truth.

LISTEN: JOSEPH HALLINAN - WHY WE MAKE MISTAKES