- Should the government be able to monitor (in real time) patients who get opioid prescriptions?
- There are now 3 times as many non-faculty as there are faculty per student at the best schools in the U.S. HT: Arnold Kling
- RAND report: Mainstream news coverage is geared towards upholding pre-established narratives. Actual reporting has become exceedingly rare.
- Study: Hospice care saves money.
- Why nurses matter.
- Study: two years after unionization, nursing homes were more than 30 percentage points more likely than nonunion nursing homes to report an illness or injury to OSHA.
Was Obamacare a Plot to Usher in Medicare-for-All?
At the time of the Affordable Care Act’s passage, many suspicious conspiracy theory proponents suggested the goal of Obamacare was to fail in order to usher in a single-payer program of Medicare-for-All. The theory goes something like this: with nowhere to turn except the government, Americans would finally throw up their hands and acquiesce to government intervention. Seniors purportedly all love their Medicare, so why not expand the program to cover everyone?
Why Has Medicare Spending Slowed?
Spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade.
If Medicare spending had grown the way it had for much of its history, federal spending would have been $3.9 trillion higher since 2011, and deficits would have been more than a quarter larger, according to an Upshot analysis. The difference is more than could be saved by raising the eligibility age for Social Security or converting Medicaid into a block grant, controversial proposals raised by legislators concerned about the federal debt.
Tuesday Links
- Labor Day good news: the number of hours worked per year, per worker has fallen by more than one-third over the last century.
- As your hourly wage rises, so does the opportunity cost of leisure.
- NYT on the reason A.I. is an existential threat: it will usher in an new era of neoliberalism.
- Almost 20 scholars offer remedies for revitalizing conservatism. A bird’s eye view suggests they all want us to stand athwart history and yell, “STOP.”
- Enslaved Africans were responsible for introducing the practice of smallpox inoculation throughout the Americas by the 1700s. Interesting, but speculative.
- Even the proponents of colonoscopies and breast cancer screening think they only lower cancer death by 20%. HT: Arnold Kling