- US health care spending has outpaced OECD spending since the passage of Obamacare.
- America is the only country where a majority of people think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.”
- Why are drug overdose deaths declining?
- How Trump’s latest pharma deals may undermine efforts to rein in drug costs.
- The Hospital at Home program is ready to scale.
Category: John C. Goodman
Thursday Links – 3 September 2026
- Mark Cuban: hospitals don’t know their costs.
- RFK, Jr: Health care providers, insurers and health technology companies paid the AMA more than $300 million last year for permission to use its Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes. (InsideHealthPolicy)
- Why NYC has a housing problem: Between 1998 and 2026, there were 3,364 new laws affecting housing in the city.
- Why we need skilled immigrants.
Wednesday Links – 2 September 2026
- Study: Climbing at least six flights a day reduces the likelihood of a major cardiovascular issue, like stroke or heart attack.
- Should Robert E. Lee’s portrait hang at West Point?
- 12 OECD countries had individual net wealth taxes in 1990. By 2017, only four OECD countries still had them.
- The new pancreatic cancer drug will cost $480,000 a year. (NYT)
- Electronic medical records: The industry became exceptionally good at documenting encounters…. What it never became particularly good at was helping individuals assemble those encounters into a coherent picture of their health over time.
Tuesday Links – 1 September 2026
Across five cancers, Medicaid beneficiaries were between 11% and 42% more likely than privately insured patients to wait more than a month for treatment. Medicare patients fared somewhat better but were still between 4% and 12% more likely to wait a month or more than individuals with private coverage.
Medicaid and Medicare patients are more likely than patients with private coverage to face extended emergency-room waits before being admitted to a hospital.
- The low down on Roy Cohn. (The Atlantic)
- No more GLP-1?
A handful of major corporations have recently said they are ending coverage of GLP-1s specifically for obesity, including PepsiCo, Starbucks, PwC, and HCA Healthcare. Large health insurers, state Medicaid plans, and public-sector employers have been cutting GLP-1 coverage for weight loss since 2024. (Statnews)