- “Longer life with no greater proportion lived in good health equals more years in poor health—statistically, for the population at large.” Interesting throughout, with implications for research and public policy priorities.
- Obesity drugs could save Medicare $100 billion a year.
- 40% of privately insured patients receive no preventive care, despite the ACA mandate for free coverage.
- David Henderson grades the US on how far we have come toward achieving Karl Marx’s ten public policy goals.
- Monopoly matters: “in states in which the market share of the dominant health insurer exceeded 71 percent…[that] payer, on average, paid 14.7 percent less to hospitals than market-leading insurers in more competitive insurance markets.”
White House Ends Vaccine Mandates for Federal workers
Actually, the mandates don’t actually end until “May 11, the same day that the COVID-19 public health emergency ends.”
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity comments:
It was clear by late 2021 that the vaccines had no meaningful effect on transmission, and that prior infection was at least as protective as vaccination. These mandates have been pure drama ever since, and the United States is among the last countries in the world to still impose them. They backfired in many ways-making many millions of Americans suspicious of Big Brother orders requiring the shots.
AI Chatbot Judged More Empathetic than Physicians
The human language artificial intelligence ‘chatbot’ ChatGPT scored higher on empathy than its human counterparts in a recent study of medical questions and answers. When compared to human doctors the AI chatbots answers were preferred 80% of the time. The study appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study used questions from Reddit’s AskDocs social media forum. One possible weakness about…
Why MA Upcoding is a Thing of the Past
In the past:
When the OIG did audits on fraud for Medicare Advantage for the past several years, the literal definition of fraud in their reviews was to have a code in the RAPS payment system that was not the one in the actual medical record of the patient… [and] they estimated in a couple of reports that the fraud level using that definition … would be as much as 6 percent of the total Medicare Advantage spend.
The fee-for-service Medicare fraud level ranges from 6–7 percent, so the people looking at both numbers said that the plans and the caregivers were in the same ball park….