- NYU Lagone Health is offering virtual urgent care as an alternative to the emergency room.
- Matt Holt: while primary care is skimping by, hospitals have so much money they are paying their senior people million dollar salaries and starting hedge funds.
- Direct Primary Care: Society of Actuaries study: ER visit are 40% lower.
- Direct Primary Care case study: DPC reduced health plan spending by 54%, employees’ out-of-pocket costs at the point of care by 30%, and employee premiums by 20%.
Author: John C. Goodman
Monday Links
- Biden reverses course – reinstates Trump policies he initially cancelled.
- Why can’t you have a televisit with a doctor in another state?
- Cato is having an online forum on telehealth.
- “The program’s stated goal is to “raise the nutrition levels of low-income households,” yet 40 percent of adult SNAP (food stamp) recipients suffer from obesity and almost 45 percent have received a diagnosis of diet-related disease — far higher rates than the general population.”
- AEI against the House-passed tax bill: “A parent of multiple children with $20,000 of annual income would face an effective tax rate of 83 percent if they took a full-time job paying $40,000 per year.” But that’s because of the other means tested welfare benefits.
Saturday Links
- More evidence that genes trump social factors in explaining behavioral outcomes.
- CDC: The new Covid vaccine is 54% effective.
- Len Schaeffer:
The level of variation in our health care system is unbelievable. You could be hospitalized for nine days in New York and for three days in California with the same diagnosis—and those differences would have no impact on outcomes. There is no other industry in the world that uses so many different approaches to the same thing and in which these differences don’t relate to better results. (Article is interesting throughout)
- “Imagine an integrated device that includes an insulin pump, a glucometer, and software that uses photos from a smartphone to carb count your food and dose insulin… The FDA’s regulatory framework is ill-equipped to deal [with this].”
- Is there a relationship between Medicaid expansion and the opioid crisis?
- The US has 36 million Health Savings Accounts, covering 72 million people.
Friday Links
- The term “neoliberalism” was coined by Nazi intellectuals as a term of derision. However, I don’t think the term is a bad one to describe modern classical liberals.
- Next big legal issue: would a reasonable physician have followed (or departed from) a guideline generated by ChatGPT or Genesis…..
- Moderate income families get more than four times as much help from the government in the Obamacare exchanges as they get for the same insurance obtained at work.
- The latest oral tobacco craze is probably something you probably have never heard of: Zyn. Apparently. It is much healthier than cigarettes.
- Biden’s CMS targets red states (e.g., Florida Texas and Missouri) with burdensome new rules, while ignoring blue states (e.g., California).