Health care prices vary tremendously from one hospital to another, and from one region to another. While it is not uncommon for prices to vary in consumer markets, there is usually a reason. For instance, a cold beverage from a convenience store by the highway is more expensive for a reason – namely convenience – compared to the same beverage on a shelf at room temperature at the local grocery store. In addition, the difference in price is probably not a multiple of one versus the other. Not so with medical care…
Thursday Links
- Some hospitals get to be urban (using urban wage indexes for calculating Medicare reimbursements) and rural (benefiting from Medicare policies solely intended to support rural health) at the same time.
- Biden era Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT): It took the IRS two years and 600 pages of explanation to provide compliance instructions for businesses hit by CAMT, and still the introduction of the tax stalled around unresolvable administrative problems.
- Bloomberg editors: $50B is not enough to save rural hospitals.
- The downside of the adoption industry.
- People who believe that life (with a soul) begins at conception have a problem with IVF. That’s always been true, even though it’s taken many years to sink in for most of them. That said, there is really nothing more to say, in my opinion. Yet, Scott Alexander has found a way to talk about this problem for page after page after page. Go figure.
Wednesday Links
- In deciding whether to work and how much to work, women are more sensitive to tax rates than men.
- Argument: direct-to-consumer drug sales are unlikely to lower drug costs to patients. (Statnews)
- RFK, Jr. does not appear to be affecting vaccination rates. (The Economist)
- Minnesota spends $45,000 per person in poverty.
- Most Favored Patient Project. (Steve Forbes and others)
Tuesday Links
- AI scores 100% on medical licensing exam. HT: Tyler
- Study:
I document that the average parliamentarian is about 1SD more culturally liberal than the national mean voter. This cultural representation gap is systematic in four ways: i) it arises on nearly all cultural issues, ii) in nearly all countries, iii) nearly all established parties are more culturally liberal than the national mean voter, and iv) all major demographic groups tend to be more conservative than their parliamentarians.