Author: John C. Goodman
Saturday Links
- A benefit of wildfires: they make temperatures unseasonably cool.
- Study: CMS delay in approving treatments for Alzheimer’s disease impose a social cost ranging from $13.1 billion to $545.6 billion. Part of these losses stems from increased private and public healthcare spending ranging from $6.8 billion to $284.5 billion.
- Hospital finances: profits and cash reserves are up; charity care is not.
- Another SS horror story: Social Security demands return of $6,000 from an 81-year-old widow for mistaken payment 45 years ago.
Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Cancelled
What if we could detect almost all cancers in the earliest stages when less-invasive treatments mean lifesaving cures? The answer: Mortality rates — and health care costs — would plummet because most cancers could be cured or controlled using existing therapies.
The good news is this innovation exists today in the form of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) from one blood test. The bad news is we don’t have an Eisenhower administration determined to deliver a medical game-changer to as many Americans as possible.
Instead, we have a Biden administration — in the form of the Federal Trade Commission and Chair Lina Khan that Biden named to head it — standing in the way and creating an impenetrable barrier to access to millions of cancer patients.
AI Practicing Medicine
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb:
Artificial intelligence has the potential to help solve some of the most frustrating problems in health care. Clinicians may use it to stratify patients more precisely according to their personal risk and to identify increasingly tailored treatments that simultaneously account for a patient’s clinical history, genomic profile, and phenotypic characteristics. The combination of statistics and weighted observations in a neural network can be highly predictive. This is true even though each output for an individual patient is likely to differ from any other patient in a validation model, and even though the variables, when taken individually, are not likely to be nearly as predictive.