Answer: Around 200,000
The numbers skyrocketed from the 1970s to about 2005.
The growth rate slowed a bit until 2010.
Since then, the pace has picked up again.
Since 1970, over 2 million MBAs have been conferred..
Source: ”Digest of Education Statistics”
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More specifically, the question that a friend and I were discussing recently was:
“Are emergency rooms required to treat all patients? … whether or not they have insurance?”
I said “yes” but decided to fact-check my answer.
“.
Here’s what I found…
Sounds like an easy question with an obvious answer, right?
Not really.
Sometimes, properly defining the market is a stumbling block for strategists.
Harvard guru Clayton Christensen tries to cut to the crux with a simple principle:
People “hire” products to do “jobs”
The jobs are situation-specific problems that customers have to resolve.
Christensen says that the best way to define (and segment) is based on “jobs to be done”.
He calls the approach “milkshake marketing” …. the 5-minute video explains why.
Here’s a more rigorous definition of the “Jobs to be DOne” Framework …
The WaPo published some education statistics extracted from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Note: The source – ”Digest of Education Statistics” – is a veritable treasure trove of education statistics
One dissected data series was the distribution of undergrad degrees granted.
I was a bit surprised to see that roughly 1 in 5 undergraduate degrees granted are in business.
Note: The gray lines are at the 10% and 20%
Here are a few other points that caught my eye …
During 2013, the left-leaning Washington Post slapped President Obama with a slew of Pinnochios.
The year ended with PolitiFact.com – a branch of the left-leaning Tampa Bay Times — giving President Obama their “Lie of the Year” award for his infamous oft-repeated “Like your plan, keep you plan …Like your doctor, keep you doctor”. Source
So, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that, in a recent poll, 61% of the people polled said that President Obama lied on important issues some or most of the time
Only 15 % said that he never lied.
The drill-down number get more interesting …
Here’s a shocker …
They spend less time seeing patients.
Medscape does an annual hours and pay survey.
For 2013, the Medscape survey said that the average doctor was face-to-face with patients about 41 hours …. with about 2/3s of them in the 40 to 50 hours cluster.
How does the 41 hours compare to historical rates?
According to Medscape:
A 2010 study in JAMA found that after no significant change between 1977 and 1997 in the hours per week that physicians spend with patients’
Patient hours decreased steadily from 54.6 to 51.0 between 1997 and 2007.
The study authors attributed the decrease to a parallel 25% inflation-adjusted decline in fees between 1996 and 2006.
Shocker, right? 54.6 to 51 to 41 …
Pay somebody less and they’re less incentivized to bust their humps.
Think about that each time you hear about the Feds and insurance companies ratchet down the reimbursement rates to “fix” the healthcare system,
I’m betting the under on that one.
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I love David Copperfield.
For that matter, I like practically all illusionists.
One trick that illusionists use is to get the audience focused on a decoy … to redirect the audience away from where the “trick” is really happening.
On Wall Street, the decoy is sometimes called a “red herring” … “something that misleads or distracts from the relevant or important issue.”
Like a deft illusionist, President Obama now has the country focused on the 8 million folks who have signed-up on the ObamaCare Exchanges.
This decoy fell into Obama’s hands when the web site crashed and Republicans, started spotlighting the number – assuming that it would be a clear indicator to the country that ObamaCare failed.
Bingo: GOP gets everybody focused on the 7 million number ,,,, Obama hits the Ferns … sign-ups blow past 8 million … GOP loses its talking point … Obama takes a victory lap.
Not so fast.
Guess what?
The 8 million number is a red herring – plain & simple.
Here’s what we should all be focusing on …
Say, what?
During last Thursday’s impromptu press conference, President Obama ballyhooed that the OC Exchanges had passed 8 million sign-ups (whatever the heck a “sign-up” is) … and that the CBO’s “latest estimate” says the ObamaCare “costs are down 15% from the prior estimate”.
Oh, really?
My BS detector auto-starts when I hear well-parsed, weasely words like those.
Wonder when the latest estimate was made? What were the assumptions? How does it tie to the miracle of 8 million?
So, I took a moment to dissect that statement … the digging didn’t disappoint
Wash Post had an interesting analysis titled “This graph shows how bad the Fed is at predicting the future
The crux of their argument: the Fed has a clear recent tendency to mis-forecast economic growth … not by a little, by a lot … forecasting almost twice as rapid growth as is ultimately realized.
For example, in 2009 the Fed was predicting 4.2 percent growth in 2011. But then in 2010 it revised that down to 3.85 percent growth. And in 2011 they revised it further to 2.8 percent growth. And when all was said and done, the economy only grew about 2.4 percent that year. The Fed projected growth almost twice as fast as what actually happened.
What’s going on?
Since it’s tax week, I thought I’d flashback to a drill down I did on the tax system — who pays in, where does it go and who benefits …
In a prior post, we drilled down on taxes … or, as my Dem friends would say government “revenues”.
We posted that in 2012 Americans paid a tad over $5 trillion in taxes to the Feds, States and Local Governments.
Drilling down, the $5 trillion is split roughly 50%-30%-20% to the Feds, States and Locals, respectively. Note that the Federal portion is just under $2.5 trillion.
* * * * *
If these are “revenues” there must be matching services provided, right?
I found a study by the non-partisan Tax Foundation that analyzes taxes paid and benefits received.
The study is old – using 2004 data – but, in my opinion is a good starting point to calibrate the answer.
Recently I gave a pitch that touched on whether quants (left-brainers) or poets (right-brainers) were on the rise.
Reminded me of a cool 15 minute TED Talk.
Tech entrepreneur Kevin Slavin tells how algorithms have reached across industries and into every day life.
A couple of lines caught my attention:
Obviously, Slavin comes down on the side of the quants.
Worth listening to this pitch … a very engaging geek who may be onto something big.
* * * * *
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According to Business Week …
“Disney has launched a $1 billion experiment in crowd control, data collection, and wearable technology that could change the way people play—and spend—at the Most Magical Place on Earth. “
The innovation – called MyMagic – let’s Mickey track every move you make around the old Magic Kingdom.
McKinsey recently published a report “Big Data – The Next Frontier” that concludes:
The United States faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to make decisions based on their findings.
Crunch those nums …
Some highlights from an HBR article: The Hidden Biases in Big Data
These days the business and management science worlds are focused on how large datasets can decode consumers’ behavior patterns … enabling marketers to laser-target high potential prospects with finely-honed messages, offers, and “attention”.
“Big data” … becomes problematic when it adheres to “data fundamentalism” … the notion that correlation always indicates causation, and that massive data sets and predictive analytics always reflect objective truth … that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”
Big data has hidden biases in both collection methods and analysis …
In class this week, I was noting that for many (most ?) retailers, the difference between low (on no) profits and extraordinary profits is getting people to throw just one more item into the shopping cart.
Well, Business Insider must have been listening in …
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Specifically, BI offered up 18 ways that retail stores get us to buy more stuff.
Here’s the list …
A news story caught my eye yesterday.
But, first some context …
Have you ever heard of “cow tipping?
It’s a ritual where drunk farm boys sneak up on cows and tip them over.
Technical note: I have no idea why they have to be drunk, but it’s always stated that way.
Last year , Modern Farmer magazine published a scientific study on cow tipping.
Basically, Modern Farmer debunked the rural legend:
Cow tipping, at least as popularly imagined, does not exist.
Drunk young men do not, on any regular basis, sneak into cow pastures and put a hard shoulder into a cow taking a standing snooze, thus tipping the poor animal over.
While in the history of the world there have surely been a few unlucky cows shoved to their side by gang of boozed-up morons, we feel confident in saying this happens at a rate roughly equivalent to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.
The evidence against cow tipping is immense, and backed up by both farmers and the laws of physics
Ignore the cheap shot at my favorite Cubbies … focus on the “boozed up morons” and the “laws of physics”.
The Modern Farmer study was provocative enough that it was picked up by Slate.com with the following headline:
Uh-oh, this is where things get really interesting …
Have you ever really looked at the EOB (“Explanation of Benefits”) that you’ve gotten from your health insurance company after getting medical care?
I hadn’t … just threw the letters into the file … or wastebasket.
But, the ObamaCare launch has heightened my interest … and recently, unfortunately, I’ve been able to gather some personal empirical data points.
Here’s the first part of my story …
OK, here’s a test for you …
Rank the the following by the odds that somebody who is in the group or who is exposed to the risk is likely to die.
Make #1 the highest risk of dying in the next year; make #7 the lowest risk circumstance
And the answer is …
Now that the ObamaCare site has logged over 7 million sign-ups (yeah, right) I expect the focus to shift to the mix of the Exchange’s mix of old, unhealthy folks who consume lots of healthcare (i.e. more than they pay for their insurance) and young invincibles who pay in but don’t consume much.
The common wisdom is that the ObamaCare insurance exchange needs healthy young people to subsidize the older, less healthy enrollees … otherwise, policies offered on the exchanges will go into a premiums’ death spiral.
I’m not so sure.
Here’s my thinking …
Yesterday, President Obama took a victory lap for getting over 7 million folks to put a free or heavily discounted ObamaCare policy in their shopping basket or to click the “I tried, don’t fine me” button.
Still no word on how many folks “bought” policies … i.e. paid the 1st months premium … insurance companies say that 20% haven’t.
And, McKinsey says 73% of the 7.1 million are from the pool of over 6 million folks who had their insurance policies cancelled because of ObamaCare.
Focus for a second on that 6 million number.
At the time the cancellations were announced, Jay Carney – Obama’s front man — said the 6 million is “just a sliver or cut of the 5% of the people on the individual market who are affected.”
Here’s the video clip. The killer quote comes at about the 2:20 mark
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Let me be sure that I understand: 6 million is a “sliver” but 7 million is a big number.
Hmmm
What if the 7.1 turns out to be only 1.5 … [7.1 X 80% X 27% = 1.5]
Won’t that be smaller than a sliver?
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Recent issue of Business Week ran an article titled “Keeping the Mystery Out of China’s Meat”
Can’t explain why I decided to read it.
But, I did … and here’s what caught my eye.
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