In response to this podcast I did with Mike Munger, listener Milli Pritchett writes:
I am a pregnant woman in Salt Lake City, Utah. This weekend our health department had a mass H1N1 flu shot clinic, with 7,000 shots to give out, in 4 clinics. It started at 7am. I knew my chances were pretty small when I saw the night before people were already lined up. When I got there at 7am, I wasn’t hopeful, seeing what looked like 4,000 people lined up. I went and stood at the back of the line and started to wait. After about twenty minutes one of the Health department people came up to our group and said there was no point in waiting as they would run out of the vaccine about 1,000 people ahead of me. Some people started arguing with the guy, I just left. (I later on learned that 45,000 people lined up outside one of the clinics).
One of the main concerns and problems in this to me was that it was free. It seems to me that had they charged at least 20 dollars a person, half those people maybe would not have even been there. There are people that aren’t in the high risk groups getting the shots, just because they are free. I thought about it, and I would have paid and still would pay about 200 dollars for the shot. Maybe, next time I will think ahead and offer that amount to someone in line ahead of me…
My response:
Milli,
I checked into your story and found this video.
Also spoke with the Salt Lake Valley Health Department. Pregnant women were one of five groups that were supposed to get priority and receive the vaccine on Saturday:
* Pregnant women
* Those who live with or care for children younger than 6 months of age,
* Health care and emergency services personnel with direct patient contact,
* People between the ages of 6 months and 24 years,
* People ages 25 through 64 years with chronic health disorders such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, chronic cardiovascular disease and those with compromised immune systems.People who lined up had to fill out a form vouching for their status in these groups. But it was on the “honor system.” No one had to prove they were pregnant or asthmatic or worked with infants.
So either there were too many priority people or too many people who claimed priority.
Maybe, just maybe, it would have been better to charge something instead of giving it away.
BTW, it was a CDC program administered locally.
We’ve made the same mistake of giving it away, before.
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RE: “Since that price is below a normal market price fewer companies want to get into that game”
Yes, and Wal-Mart's monopsony power pushes prices “below a normal market price” and drives people out of the game too. So? I fail to see your point.
RE: “See the government – in all of its wiseness – expects that it can get a below normal price and get the quantity it wants at the same time. No market actor can do that.”
IF IT CAN'T GET THE AMOUNT IT WANTS IT WILL OFFER A HIGHER PRICE, JUST LIKE ANY OTHER MARKET ACTOR!!!
The long lines are only there because of manufacturing problems. Are you going to blame the problems producing the vaccine on the price the government agreed to as well? There are lines at doctors and hospitals not supplied by the government too.
Sounds like a great idea to me. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm getting at. Target recipients.
No, they are their due to government price controls.
Ahh, doctors and hospitals are subject to a vast array of price and supply controls. Not remotely the best argument you could make.
What price controls mommsen1625? You keep referencing these price controls. What exactly are you talking about?
The Vaccines for Children program is one such price control program.
In what way? The government still purchases vaccines on the market for VFC. I guess I'm just not understanding how you define “price control”. To me, a price control is like a minimum wage or rent control – where the government will not allow market activity to go on above or below a legislated price. That's not what goes on in any of these vaccination programs. The government buys things in the market, sure. That doesn't make it a price control. Anybody that places a 250 million vaccination order could get a similar price because they're buying in bulk like that.
When the government makes itself the near exclusive buyer and does not allow the price to float that looks like a price control to me. It certainly comes with all the attendant problems associated with price controls.
But let's not get trapped by words; the long and short of the matter is this: the government has failed to adequately provide for vaccines by policies which have shrunk the number of vaccine manufacturers by roughly 90%. This is a classic example of a government failure.
My idea was to let the market decide who gets the vaccine rather than the government. That is, no targets.
Over a short enough period of time all supply is inelastic, but even with perfectly inelastic supply markets clear. That is, regardless of whether there is a market response over the relevant period of time, markets should be allowed to clear and vaccines should be allocated by that market according to the free decisions of sellers and purchasers.
This notion that the government can somehow allocate vaccines more efficiently or more justly than the market is simply silly. If it could do that why stop at vaccines? Why not cars, corn and sofas?
Selling at a day care center targets people who would get a great deal of use out of it. I don't recall saying anything about government in agreeing with you on this point.
I'm sure we have other disagreements on the role of government, but not that selling at a daycare center would be a bad idea.
The question is – why isn't it being sold at the day care center? My place of employment (not a daycare center!) is selling the flu vaccine. Not all places of employment are. Why not? Could it be that ability to pay isn't well correlated with need?
But insofar as it is being sold at daycare centers, I strongly agree that that's good. I'm not sure why you think I'm saying that involves government.
My (perfectly reasonable) interpretation of “not well correlated” is that the derived correlation coefficient is not statistically different from zero. Your interpretation is that it is not clearly zero, and it is not something else called “highly correlated”, which is not defined, but which must be less than or equal to 1. So “not well correlated” to you means a correlation greater than 0 and less than 1 . It's all so obvious now!
I just drove to a local restaurant and ate a chicken sandwich. Was I “targeted” for consumption of that sandwich?
Sorry. I made a mistake. “Not well correlated” means a correlation that is PROBABLY greater than 0 and less than some unspecified value that itself is less than 1. Now I've got it.
I suppose it's not unreasonable, but I'm not sure why you would just assume that I mean not statistically significant from zero. Even if we presuppose that all correlations are statistically significant from zero, the correlation itself can still vary. I'm not putting hard limits on what is “high” and what is “low”. I wasn't even really speaking in such strict statistical terms – I was speaking more colloquially (although expressing it in statistical terms works too).
Let's take a correlation of vulnerability to the flu and willingness to buy of 0.1, and let's say it's statistically significant. I would call that “not well correlated”. That doesn't mean I'm saying that there is no relationship between the two. There is one. It's just not a particularly important one.
I'm not sure why you dragged statistical significance into this. I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that all these correlations are significant – despite the fact that I wasn't speaking so formally in the first place.
You can bet the owner of the store targeted you, yes. You're not going to see much bacon sold in Tel Aviv, and you won't find a hamburger in Mumbai. The fact is you want to paint everyone that disagrees with you as an advocate of Big Government, but I'm sorry – that's not inherent in what I say. I'm sure I do have a different view of the role of the state than you – certainly on this particular issue of vaccination. But that doesn't change the fact that you were targeted, and it has nothing to do with the government. I'm glad you got a chicken sandwich and I'd be glad if daycare workers got vaccinations. My concern is with the question of why and when that doesn't happen (because we know why it does happen when it does – Adam Smith and others figured that out hundreds of years ago… nothing particularly interesting in understanding why things work when they work right).
Right.
It makes much more sense than your assumption that “not well correlated” means “not correlated” or “a correlation of zero”.
I'm simply arguing for the generally accepted difference between “not well” and “not at all”. I'm not sure why you have such a problem with that.
I finally read the article and regularly I really wouldn't worry so much about the flu. Mostly, I was concerned about getting any form of the flu because I am pregnant. I got my regular flu shot, and I would worry less but I also work helping customers all day in a sales type job. The other reason I would like to get it is that my doctor told me to.
All in all, reading the article was interesting and does raise questions about the vaccine, but I am trying to not take such risks with my health right now. Basically, I don't want to take the chance of getting very ill and dying.
I live in Salt Lake and got the H1N1 vaccination without too much trouble because I work in health care, and health care workers are on a “priority list” for the first round of vaccinations. As someone else mentioned in this thread, pregnant women are also on this priority list. Milli, check out this website: http://www.utahflufighters.org/?gclid=CL7Qhde9p.... Good luck to both you and your baby.
I live in Salt Lake and got the H1N1 vaccination without too much trouble because I work in health care, and health care workers are on a “priority list” for the first round of vaccinations. As someone else mentioned in this thread, pregnant women are also on this priority list. Milli, check out this website: http://www.utahflufighters.org/?gclid=CL7Qhde9p.... Good luck to both you and your baby.
I live in Salt Lake and got the H1N1 vaccination without too much trouble because I work in health care, and health care workers are on a “priority list” for the first round of vaccinations. As someone else mentioned in this thread, pregnant women are also on this priority list. Milli, check out this website: http://www.utahflufighters.org/?gclid=CL7Qhde9p.... Good luck to both you and your baby.
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