- How UnitedHealth used secret rules to keep Medicare Advantage patients out of rehab.
- Former NIH director on lockdowns: You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.
- Medicare Advantage enrollment: As of 2021, 59% of Black Medicare beneficiaries, 67% of Hispanic beneficiaries, and 55% of Asian and Pacific Islander beneficiaries were enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan as compared with 43% of White beneficiaries. Left out of the headline: These disparities mirror the same disparities found in traditional Medicare.
- Pandemic unemployment insurance benefits: Once they ended, the flow of people from unemployment to work increased by two thirds.
- How Medicare determines what it pays for medical care.
Category: John C. Goodman
Wednesday Links
- To stay healthy, eat nuts, beans and whole grains.
- Can germs be good for you? One study says yes.
- Drug shortages are affecting half a million consumers. The problem has persisted for more than 20 years.
- Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s bill would abolish “disparate treatment based on ethnicity or creed” and “compelled speech” at colleges and universities that receive federal money.
- The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries. Could lack of civility and empathy be the reason?
Tuesday Links
- George W. Bush’s PEPFAR initiative is credited with saving at least 20 million lives. Nick Kristof calls it “the single best policy of any president in my lifetime.”
- Old people are the wealthiest and most powerful demographic in the United States. Despite this, they are overwhelmingly beneficiaries of the welfare state, have seniority rights in employment, and are a protected class when it comes to anti-discrimination laws. This essay argues that this is a bad thing …..
- Dickens on poverty (and an unkind word for economists).
- People think chatbots are more empathetic than doctors 80% of the time.