About 30 million school kids qualify for free or low-cost school lunches through the National School Lunch Program. A dozen years ago a federal law tightened school lunch nutritional requirements with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The federal law hoped to increase school kids intake of vegetables, fruits, fiber, grains and unsweetened beverages. The federal initiative was in response to findings that children who got free lunches were gaining more weight than higher income children not in the program. Prior to the tightened federal standards, low-income children enrolled in the school lunch program were more likely to have a body mass index closer to the obesity threshold than their higher-income peers. Rather than alleviate hunger, there was concern that the school lunch program was contributing to childhood obesity. According to the CDC, 21% of kids age 6 to 11 are obese, while 17% of adolescents age 12 to 19 are obese. Nearly 10% have severe obesity.
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Monday Links
Doctors file lawsuit against HHS over paying more to docs who practice “woke” medicine.
Why don’t medicines have names that are easy to pronounce and remember?
Biden Adm. wants certificate of need for charter schools.
There aren’t enough Covid boosters for everyone to have a second booster by Sept 1.
Sec. Mark Esper: Trump proposed shooting Patriot missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs.
What if Future Voters Could Vote?
An interview with Alex Tabarrok:
Future residents don’t have the vote, so we prevent building which placates the fears of current homeowners but prevents future residents from moving in. Future patients don’t have the vote, so we regulate drug prices at the expense of future new drug innovations and so forth. This has always been true, of course, but culture can be a solution to otherwise tough-to-solve incentive problems. America’s forward looking, pro-innovation, pro-science culture meant that in the past we were more likely to protect the future.
Drug Maker’s Copay Assistance Ended Up in Drug Plans’ Pockets
A while back I wrote about drug company copay assistance programs. The purpose of these is to entice patients to use higher-cost brand drugs by blunting health plan incentives for enrollees to choose lower-cost drug options.