- How an (apparently) serious study of a vegan diet became fodder for a blatant propaganda film.
- Medicaid’s claim denials are higher than in Medicare or commercial insurance.
- GAO: Improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid top $100B. The number for Medicare Advantage is $17B – a little more than half of the total for traditional Medicare.
- Oprah ignores the downside of weight loss drugs.
- Jim Capretta reviews Obamacare – including all the provisions that either didn’t work or have been repealed.
- After completely screwing up Covid tests, the FDA now wants control of all other laboratory developed tests.
Author: John C. Goodman
Friday Links
- California had the worst job growth of any state.
- How Medicare pays providers: for the fiscal year that began on October 1, the new rule for hospital inpatient care is just short of 800 pages, with three columns of text for most of the published pages. The physician fee schedule and skilled nursing facilities rules for 2024 run 1227 and 147 pages, respectively.
- Other things equal, 3 psychological traits (competitiveness, risk tolerance, and confidence) lead to higher incomes.
- The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review determined that a cost-effective price for the newly approved gene therapy Lenmeldy is between $2.3M and $3.9M. Orchard Therapeutics, will be asking $4.25M.
- Why is colon cancer rising among young adults, but falling for seniors?
Thursday Links
- Obamacare is making health insurance companies rich.
- Aaron Carroll reviews health care systems around the world in 10 minutes. Pretty good on the market-based systems in Switzerland and Singapore and the public/private systems in Australia and New Zealand. But when it comes to the UK and Canada, he fails to mention the extraordinary waits and health care rationing.
- Federal health bureaucracies operated by doctors and lawyers regulate about a fifth of our economy and a quarter of the federal budget – jobs that need the insights of economists.
- When the cost of prevention is included, the total loss from Covid was lower in the U.S. than in the EU.
- The CBO estimated that (Obamacare) exchange enrollees would cost federal taxpayers $6,850 each by 2021. The reality: $20,739, or over three times as much.
Wednesday Links – 27 March 2024
- Contrary to the AMA and the CDC, there is no maternal mortality crisis. The authors found that the maternal mortality rate remained essentially flat between 1999 and 2002 (10.2 per 100,000 live births) and 2018 and 2021 (10.4). This would put the U.S. on par with other developed countries.
- Biden to lower the hammer on short-terms health insurance plans any day now.
- There were 17,597 dog bite liability claims filed across the country in 2022, with payouts totaling more than $1 billion.
- Average life expectancy has declined because a lot of young people are dying early (e.g., drug overdoses); among people who make it to old age, life expectancy is longer than ever.