- Casey Mulligan: Medicaid financing gimmicks are driving up costs for everyone.
- Using electronic heath records, a Kaiser model can effectively identify individuals at high risk of developing Type 2 diabetes up to 10 years in advance.
- Yglesias: Where Trump has failed us: from the screwworm to Ebola.
- We are one step closer to designer babies.
- Currently, the cost of adopting a healthy baby is from $40,000 to $85,000, paid to various middlemen.
- The Medicare actuary’s office calculates there was a roughly 18-fold increase in spending on skin substitutes over the past four years.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Friday Links – 12 June 2026
- Trustees: Medicare becomes insolvent in 2033; Social Security in 2032.
- Cato: The long term deficit is worse than what the Trustees report.
- The Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model is a new prior authorization initiative managed through CMS.
- Noah Smith: The amount private insurers extract from the health care system is not large compared to the amount that gets either appropriated or wasted by the people providing the care.
- Real wages are falling: that’s a danger for Republicans.
A Better Way to Solve Medical Debt than Borrowing
Medical debt is a severe problem for many people, especially those with health problems and cheap insurance. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) conducted a survey that found 41% of American adults have medical debts. About one-quarter of adults have medical bills they are having trouble paying off. Nearly half of those with debts (about 44%) owe at least $2,500, while 12% owe more than $10,000. While these amounts do not sound outrageous compared to the cost of automobiles and mortgages, these debts may be inflated by price gouging.
Thursday Links – 11 June 2026
- OpenEvidence’s A.I. app, essentially a chatbot for medicine, has become a viral hit with physicians. (NYT)
- Even some people with normal body weight by B.M.I. standards could be considered to have obesity.
- RFK Jr.: Make french fries great again.
- “Give us a ransom payment of $5,000 or we will harvest your son’s kidney and sell it.”
- This Ebola outbreak threatens to be the worst in history.