- “The crackdown on [opioid] pain pills replaced legally manufactured, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy black-market products of unknown provenance and composition. Meanwhile, prohibition fostered the rise of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute.”
- Jeffrey Singer testified with the same message. He was the Democrats’ witness!
- Telemedicine is being widely used in Ukraine.
- Paragon: In 2019, New York (state per capita income: $67,366) received $17,145 in federal Medicaid funding per person in poverty, while Alabama (state per capita income: $43,288) received $6,148.
- CBO’s options for reducing health care spending: establishing caps on federal spending for Medicaid; limiting state taxes on providers; reducing the federal Medicaid match rates; increasing Medicare Part B premiums; reducing Medicare Advantage benchmarks; and reducing the tax subsidies for employment-based insurance, etc. What about a free market for health care?
Is Medical Debt Bad? Sometimes; Sometimes Not
Millions of people struggle with medical indebtedness. Millions more are thought to forgo care or put off treatment, hoping to avoid medical bills. The nonprofit media, Kaiser Health News, published extensive surveys on medical debt in 2022. According to National Public Radio (NPR):
Tuesday Links
- Does lead in the air affect learning in school?
- Stephen Pinker: The development of artificial general intelligence is incoherent and not achievable.
- Increased access to physicians results in better health – at least in Nigeria.
- If the estimates from Statista Consumer Marketing Research are accurate, from 2020 to 2022 the world bought 928 billion masks at a cost of $389 billion — most of them made of plastic. I wonder how much of the plastic ended up in the ocean?
- Oops. The Inflation Reduction Act will increase taxes on millions of Americans earning less than $400,000, despite the president’s repeated promises not to do that. And that’s only for starters.
Monday Links
- The IRA bill threatens orphan drugs.
- Study finds links between the popular zero-calorie sugar substitute erythritol and an increased risk of cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke.
- But the study has limits. (NYT)
- Death on demand: Canadian euthanasia is killing about 27 people a day on average — over 10,000 a year.