Comparing health insurance plans whether signing up through Healthcare.gov or weighing employer-sponsored plans with a spouse can feel like wading through a sea of information on deductibles, co-payments and monthly premiums. Now that more than 11 million people have chosen a plan during this years Healthcare.gov enrollment period, which ended on Feb. 15, three experts are pondering how to make this intimidating task even easier for next years registrants? They have laid out their prescription for improving the health insurance marketplace, grounded in psychology and behavioral research, in a perspective published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This is a really complicated decision to make and a pretty high-stakes one, too -- it can mean a lot of money, Peter Ubel, a co-author and health marketing expert at Duke University, says. I think a better designed system would actually be faster to go through and yet still help you make a better decision.

In the existing marketplace, the authors dont like the way plans are sorted into gold, silver and bronze categories.They think these labels make the gold plans inherently more desirable. The team did a preliminary test of this theory by presenting a choice of two plans to public bus riders in North Carolina one offering lower monthly premiums but higher out-of-pocket costs than the other and alternately labeled them gold and bronze. Inevitably, more than half of riders chose the gold plan, no matter if it had the higher or lower premiums and deductibles.

These subtle cues inherent in the labels and layout of the current marketplace may prompt consumers to make a decision that is not in their best interests. Now that we've made health insurance accessible in a legal sense, we have to make it accessible in a behavioral sense, Douglas Hough, a health economist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who was not involved in the research, says.

Another issue: Many state exchanges rank plans by monthly premium and list the plans with the lowest monthly premiums at the top. Ubel and his co-authors, who include a behavioral scientist from the University of Stirling in the U.K. and a business professor from Columbia University, say this strategy could cause a disproportionate number of people to choose the first plan, citing research that shows a tendency for consumers to choose the wine that is listed first on a curated menu. Arranging plans by deductibles or the number of doctors and hospitals covered may prompt consumers to pick plans in an entirely different pattern, a theory that Ubel says should be tested.

Hough thinks the health insurance marketplace software should play a more active role in aiding consumer decisions by offering suggestions based on their searches or the way other registrants have acted. Given the complexity, I think people are looking for heuristics, rules of thumb -- they're looking for a guide, he says. His vision would look more like Amazon.com. People who bought this have also bought that, people who looked at this have also looked at that, he says. Or, the interface might work like TurboTax in asking a series of simple questions meant to steer consumers in the right direction.

Since the early technological woes of the Healthcare.gov rollout have largely been overcome, Ubel hopes the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the agencies that oversee state exchanges, can finally start to speak with behavioral researchers and apply some of these principles. I actually talked to a couple of groups when they were designing the exchanges to see if they wanted free consultation, he says. I had great preliminary phone calls but they were too busy to get back to me, which I understand.

Hough cautions that while behavioral scientists may be able to lend some insight into this process, they cant be expected to provide all the answers. One of the dangers of behavioral economics is people get really excited for it and start applying it willy-nilly without recognizing that there's a lot of things we don't know, he says. We know what the solutions are conceptually, but not really at the ground floor where we really need to make the changes.

Read the original:
Obama's Healthcare.gov Website Isn't Consumer-Friendly Enough, Experts Say

In a new paper, a group of MIT researchers argue that science is producing PhDs in far greater numbers than there are available tenured jobs for them to fill.

The authors, engineers Richard C. Larson, Navid Ghaffarzadegan, and Yi Xue, start out by noting that

The academic job market has become more and more competitive nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation.

But why? Are we simply producing too many PhDs nowadays? Larson et al. approach this question by borrowing a concept from epidemiology: R0 (R nought), known as the basic reproduction number. In the context of an infectious disease, R0 is the average number of people who are newly infected by the disease by each existing patient. Influenza, for example, has an R0 of about 1.2 1.6. If R0 is greater than 1, the disease will spread exponentially.

Larson et al. define the academic R0 as the total number of PhD graduates created by (supervised by) the average tenure-track academic (i.e professor) over the course of the professors career. If this number is greater than 1, more PhDs will be created than there are tenured posts for them all to occupy assuming that the number of tenured professors is roughly constant.

It turns out that the R0 at MIT is approximately 10. MIT produces some 500 PhDs per year, and it has 1000 faculty. So each faculty member produces 0.5 students per year. Since the average faculty members career at MIT spans 20 years, each faculty member produces 10 PhDs in total.

By using the same approach, Larson et al. say that the R0 across the whole field of engineering in the USA is 7.8. But this varies across specialties. Mining and Architectural Engineering both have a sustainable R0 of just 1, while Environmental Engineering (ironically) is the gas-guzzler of the bunch, with an R0 of 19.

Larson et al. conclude that

Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that R0 for the entire engineering field is 7.8, which implies that in a steady state, only 1/7.8 (i.e. 12.8%) of PhD graduates in engineering can attain academic positions in the USA the system in many places is saturated.

In demography, any living population eventually meets a ceiling of limited resources. Similarly in academia, the growing PhD population will eventually hit the natural ceiling of limited tenure-track positions. In some fields, it already has hit that limit the oversupply must move to nonacademic positions or be underemployed in careers that require lesser degrees.

Read more:
Does Science Produce Too Many PhD Graduates?

Denver, COLO (PRWEB) February 18, 2015

C. Thomas Howard, Ph.D., thought leader on Behavioral Investing debuts his second book this month, published and released by Harriman House. His first book Behavioral Portfolio Management, released in 2014 details his insights from years of research on Behavioral Investing and explains how investment professionals can harness price distortions driven by emotional crowds to create superior portfolios. Dr. Howards newest book The New Value Investing: How to Apply Behavioral Finance to Stock Valuation Techniques and Build a Winning Portfolio, applies the Behavioral Finance lens to value investing. His goal is to help investors identify undervalued stocks and build their own successful value investing portfolio.

It is important to understand that value investing is inextricably linked with Behavioral Finance, and research advances in this area in recent years strengthen the case for value investing, says Dr. Howard. If investors have a system of identifying stocks for their portfolio, it helps to remove the emotion from the investing process which is crucial to their success. This book helps them strengthen their system.

Howard explains how stock prices are determined by emotional crowds, how this leads to mispriced stocks and opportunities for the value investor, and how an investor can harness the insights of Behavioral Finance to improve their value investing approach. He skillfully shows in the book how to follow the path from analysis of the economy, to the industry, to company financial statements, to creating a value range for a companys stock. He even includes two complete worked examples of stock valuation for real-life companies.

Dr. Howards newest book draws upon decades of academic research and many years of successfully managing portfolios with a Behavioral Portfolio Management approach. Manager of the award-winning Athena Pure Valuation | Profitability Portfolio, Howard uses his expertise to give readers a glimpse into the decision making process of a value-oriented manager and the discipline and patience thats necessary to produce successful results. The key is patience, comments Howard. Not everyone is a value-oriented investor, but for those that follow the approach, this book should prove an invaluable resource.

About the Author: C. Thomas Howard is co-founder of AthenaInvest, a Greenwood Village-based SEC Registered Investment Advisor. He led the research project that resulted in Behavioral Portfolio Management, the methodology which underlies AthenaInvest's investment approach. He oversees Athena's ongoing research which has led to a number of patents, publication of his research and many speaking engagements at industry conferences. Dr. Howard currently serves as CEO, Director of Research, and Chief Investment Officer at AthenaInvest.

Thomas Howard is also a Professor Emeritus at the Reiman School of Finance, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, where for over 30 years he taught courses and published articles in the areas of investment management and international finance. Professor Howard holds a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Idaho, an MS in management science from Oregon State University, and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Washington. His thought leadership in Behavioral Portfolio Management has generated significant interest across the country with his articles being some of the most widely read on industry and academic websites.

For media inquiries requesting more information on AthenaInvest, please contact Pamela Saunders at (415) 254-7169. For financial professionals requesting more information, please visit http://www.AthenaInvest.com or call (877) 430-5675.

Book available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

Headquartered in Greenwood Village, Colorado, AthenaInvest is a SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Please visit http://www.athenainvest.com for additional information. 2015 by AthenaInvest, Inc. All Rights Reserved Protected by US Patents 7734526, 8352347, 8694406 and Singapore Patents 150371 and184692.

Read the original here:
C. Thomas Howard of AthenaInvest Releases Second Book: The New Value Investing