- Can access to credit affect the quality of health care hospitals deliver?
- Viewpoint: we are at the start of a 4th industrial revolution.
- Medicare Advantage telehealth primary care visits. They are more likely when the beneficiary is frail (39.4%), when the beneficiary is disabled (20.1%) and when low income (8.3%).
- Elevance study: Medicare Advantage saved Medicare as much as $144 billion over ten years. (I’ll have more to say about this study in the near future.)
Friday Links
- “Citi estimates that GLP-1 drugs could boost GDP by 0.5 percent to one percent in rich countries.”
- Why it’s become harder to extend life expectancy: Low hanging fruit is gone, now all we do is find ways to save old people for short periods of time so they just die of something else.
- “In 1940, the average worker retired at age 68 and had a much shorter life expectancy. If people retired today with the same remaining life expectancy as the 1940 retiree, they would retire at about age 77 on average.”
- Quality ratings for Medicare Advantage plans are misleading and unreliable. Ratings for ACOs are even worse.
Thursday Links
- How Republicans would change the CDC.
- The effect of one of the eat-your-spinach SS reforms: raising the normal retirement age.
- Since the passage of IRA, drug companies have discontinued an additional 36 research and over 21 drug development programs. In oncology alone, over a dozen drug development programs have been discontinued.
- The Biden-Harris administration wasted nearly one billion on covid misinformation
Is Trick or Treating on Halloween a Public Health Risk?
When I was a child, we were always hearing about horrible thing that happened to kids while trick or treating on Halloween. There were rumors of kids eating candy, only to find it laced with razorblades. There was gum adulterated with LSD and candy bars injected with Heroin. Horror stories were commonplace but come to think of it the information was always secondhand, heard from friends of friends. There was never first-person confirmation.