- Plusses and minuses of an aspirin a day.
- Benefits of a Brazil nut a day.
- Cutting funds for vaccine research (and spending them in better ways) may make sense.
- American Action Forum on the MAHA report.
- New York spends twice as much per person as Florida.
- Out-of-pocket costs for a typical enrollee are 18–24 percent lower in Medicare Advantage than in traditional fee-for-service Medicare.
- RFK, Jr. seems to have broken all his promises to Sen Cassidy.
KFF: Millions of Americans Live in Poor, Rural Dead Zones Lacking Medical Care
Millions of Americans live in areas without a readily available source of medical care that also lack Internet coverage with sufficient bandwidth to make telemedicine feasible. These areas, which tend to be poor and rural, face other obstacles that render residents sicker than average.
Friday Links
- “Routine childhood immunizations in the United States from 1994–2023 are estimated to have prevented around 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and more than 1 million deaths.”
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. picks to replace the members of the vaccine advisory panel include vaccine skeptics.
- Estimate: Across all causes of health care spending and disease burden, median spending was $114,339 per disability adjusted life year (DALY) averted between 1996 and 2016.
- By 2028, the U.S. is projected to face a shortage of more than 73,000 nurse assistants (NAs) and 63,000 registered nurses (RNs) by 2030. Can AI relieve that?
- America’s hospital system is conspicuously missing from the “waste, fraud, and abuse” targets of DOGE and the House Republicans.
- Democrats used to support work requirements for welfare benefits.
WaPo: Another Form of Social Media that Makes You Sad
Dating apps are a type of social media that is little more than databases of single people advertising to meet other single people. I met my wife that way and we have been together more than a dozen years. Dating apps are a highly efficient method to meet people you otherwise would never meet. Social media in general allows members to keep in touch with people they may lose contact with. Furthermore, I suspect similar studies would find a devastating impact on mental health from trying to meet people in person. For example, before we met my wife joined a social club that engaged in outdoor activities. She soon quit the club due to a stalker.