- Study: MA enrollees have over 70% fewer hospital readmissions and 25% fewer preventable inpatient admissions. MA exhibits lower rates of inappropriate medication use and comparable rates of medication adherence.
- How AI will change education: tutors work better than classroom instruction; but while human tutors are expensive, AI tutors may be cheap.
- Prices for new US drugs rose 35% in 2023, more than the previous year. Is this what Biden is going to run on?
- Cato video on telehealth.
- More on “if the government doesn’t regulate surgery, why does it regulate new drugs?”
Federal Agencies Easy to Scam for Ineligible Health Benefits
Federal government bureaucrats love health insurance. It’s almost like a religion. They believe in health insurance for its own sake. If you pay $500 a month for health coverage that you don’t use, that’s fine because someone else in your risk pool will use it. It’s like going to church. You should just do it and the feds encourage it.
Thursday Links
- A reminder: The Cuban health care system is far from the best in the world and nothing about it warrants extraordinary praise.
- “In the past few weeks, there’s been an explosion of new tools for programming DNA and RNA.”
- “We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology.”
- “Once groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines became available a year into the pandemic, rich countries looked out for themselves and poorer countries were largely left behind.”
- AI can handle customer calls better than humans.
Going broke
The [Penn Warton Budget Model (PWBM)] brief also outlines the effects of real interest rate increases on future debt projections. In the base case, the authors project federal debt rising from 98 percent of GDP in 2023 to 189 percent in 2050. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast shows debt reaching 169 percent of GDP that same year. If the real average interest rate for U.S. borrowing rises by 50 basis points above the PWBM forecast of 2.3 percent, then federal debt would climb to 208 percent of GDP in 2050.