This year the cost of Obamacare for someone my age living in my North Texas county is roughly $10,000 for a $10,000 deductible. That means I would pay premiums of just over $800 a month in return for coverage that would cover nothing unless my health needs exceed $800 a month for the entire year. Assuming I spent more than $10,000 during the coverage period, the ACA plan would cover only $0.60 cents of every dollar I spend above my deductible.
Saturday Links – 28 February 2026
- Dr. Oz’s new proposal would allow one kind of health plan to raise the annual deductible to more than $15,000 for an individual and $31,000 for a family. ?????
- In 1979, households in the lowest income quintile earned about 53 percent of their total income in the marketplace. Since then, that figure has plummeted to an all-time low of just 33 percent,
- CBO: Medicare Part A Trust fund will be exhausted by 2040.
- What the IRA bill has done to projected prescription drugs spending.
Friday Links – 27 February 2026
- How Mark Cuban would run a hospital.
- More than 40 million people use ChatGPT for health care questions every day.
- “The cost of developing a new medicine has roughly doubled every nine years, while the number of drugs produced per research dollar has steadily declined.”
- Median family income rose by almost $2,400 after inflation in 2025.
Thursday Links – 26 February 2026
- Even for the healthy, income after taxes and transfers has been growing faster than market income.
- Interesting argument: Medical advances over the past 40 years have masked the epidemic of violence by lowering the murder rate by more than five times.
- Tyler Cowen’s vision of what an AI-dominated world would look like.
- Alysa Liu’s dad became a single father via surrogacy.
- Three ways countries around the world are taxing carbon. (The US is in the lower fourth– between South Africa and Uruguay. China falls even lower than the US. India is lower than China.
- More than 20 percent of US Olympic medals went to athletes who grew up or trained in Vermont.
- “Of all the foods we produce on Earth, beef is the No. 1 destroyer of forests, and especially rainforests.”