It’s been nearly five years since President Trump signed into law the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act. The bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), was intended to make hearing amplification devices much cheaper and more readily accessible. The Act gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) three years to formulate a guidance proposal and an extra six months to collect comments and issue final guidance. Then COVID got in way. Or was it bureaucratic inertia that got in the way. Perhaps it was both.
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FTC to Ban Noncompete Agreements. Will Your Doctor be Freed Too?
Nowadays nearly three-quarters of physicians are hospital employees or employed by investor-owned group practices. Many are bound by employment agreements that limit their ability to easily leave a job for a new one.
Thursday Links
- 50 years of US industrial policy. For those of you who think it is something new.
- Getting the priorities right: The Senate Budget Committee this session has held a total of 29 hearings, 15 of which were on climate and just 3 on the budget.
- Burgess: Under a “warranty approach” drug companies would refund a pre-negotiated amount of the drug’s price to the payor and patient if the latter’s health does not improve as expected. Under a “cost sharing approach,” the high upfront cost of gene therapy would be shared by subsequent insurers after the treatment succeeds.
- 10,000 commandments: Federal regulatory burdens cost $1.94 trillion per year, or $14,500 per household.
- Argument: drug shortages are caused by monopolistic middlemen. (Surely not the whole of the story.)
Tuesday Links
- Food stamp households spend a disproportionate share of their food budget on unhealthy items, such as sugary beverages and prepared desserts. And it’s worse than other low-income households who don’t have food stamps.
- Social Security tells Kotlikoff the number of Social Security clawback letters per year is probably closer to 3 million. (It started at 1M in a congressional hearing; then jumped to 2M in answer to a FOIA request by KFF; and now it’s at 3M. (No telling what the real answer is.)
- Less than half of the benefit of Obamacare subsides goes to the newly insured. One-third of it is wasted.
- In 2023, 79 percent of (Obamacare) enrollees received subsidies (up from 44 percent in 2015), at an average cost of $20,739 per enrollee gaining coverage.