- How widespread is the bias against men?
- A Medicare beneficiary with obesity costs $2,018 more than a non-obese beneficiary.
- Study: obesity drugs could save Medicare as much as $100 billion per year.
- NEJM counter study: obesity drugs could cause CMS budget to skyrocket.
- Is Medicare Advantage a bad deal for rural hospitals?
Tuesday Links
- David Friedman update on what we know about covid.
- CVS Health and Cigna can charge $6,600 or more per month for the cancer drug Gleevec, a medication that went generic in 2016 and can be found for as little as $55 per month. (WSJ)
- Is telehealth a boon or a threat to rural health care.
- The reading list for Greg Mankiw’s Harvard seminar.
- HA study of people in the fifties: quality-adjusted life expectancy increased for the upper-middle economic group, but remained stagnant for the lower-middle group.
Insurers are Marking Up Drugs that Should be Cheap
Why do people buy health insurance? The most often cited reason is to transfer the risk of illness to a third party by paying a premium. University of Minnesota economist John Nyman has studied this for many years. He argues that people buy health insurance as an income transfer in the event they become sick. People who are ill often lose their income and health insurance pays a benefit that patients would use their income on. A commenter on the NCPA Health Blog a few years ago said he believed that people buy health insurance for the negotiated discounts. That makes a lot of sense.
Why Health Care is Not Competitive and How to Fix It
Technology is a significant driver of high health care spending. For instance, many treatments common today were not available 50, 40 or even 30 years ago. There are far more drugs and medical procedures than there were in the 1990s when I first began studying health care. Yet, treatments and therapies that have been in use for decades are still quite expensive. In typical consumer markets, the quality of technology gets progressively better while the inflation-adjusted prices often falls as older technology is surpassed by newer technology. This is especially true of consumer electronics but also true of automobiles, appliances and other types of consumer goods.