A completely false headline: Banning surprise medical bills is raising costs elsewhere. (STAT: gated) It’s saving patients money and causing insurers to pay a bit more. What else would you expect????
Shkreli Awards (for 2023) have arrived. My favorite: the CEO of the nation’s largest nonprofit hospital chain gets a salary of $35 million.
More evidence in favor of the Mediterranean diet.
After all these years, Matthew Holt still can’t figure out how to reduce health care costs. (Hint: look at how costs are reduced in every other market.)
Thanks for printing the Matthew Holt article…much food for thought.
Quick comments:
1. We do get something for all our spending…..knee replacements in two weeks, lifesaving drugs first internationally, remarkable heart care, etc.
“Per cent of GDP” means nothing to patients. I am not sure that this is the right mechanism to judge our systm.
2. Holt runs up against the Baumol effect all the time. Other industries substitute technology for labor all the time,, and that is how they get lower costs.
Health care (like education) is wildly labor-intensive, so costs go up.
The economist Alex Tabarrok covers this extensively in his blog Marginal Revolution.
Getting psychological counseling from AI (as Matthew suggests) seems laughable to me.