- $1,139,000,000,000—Minimum amount that Medicaid would continue to grow over the next ten years under the House-passed budget resolution, belying the notion that the budget would “cut” Medicaid spending.
- Medicaid provider taxes explained.
- More on the Republican plan to curb the rate of growth of Medicaid, not reduce its spending.
- Scientific societies call for a moratorium on creating genetically modified children.
- The average American is now vastly more affluent than the average European.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Wednesday Links
- Claim: it was the Obama administration that paused funding for high-risk (gain of function) studies in 2014. The ban was lifted by none other than Donald Trump in 2017.
- Yarvin’s strange argument on populism and Gain-of-Function research
- Firing squads are making a comeback.
- US patients pay almost three times more than the average price paid in OECD countries for brand drugs, but we pay a third less than other countries for generics.
- The case against Medicaid budget cuts. (unimaginative)
Tuesday Links
- Low-income adults are more likely to use low-valued care and less likely to use high-valued care.
- “If you invested a thousand dollars in the S&P 500 back in 1964, you’d now have several million dollars. If you invested it in Buffett’s company instead, you’d now have over a billion dollars.”
- “If Trump mandates that drugmakers have to charge the same price in America that they do in poor countries, they’ll probably just mostly raise prices in the poor countries instead of lowering them in America.”
- “Any theory of what is wrong with American health care is true because American health care is wrong in every possible way.”
- “The measles outbreak in Canada is even bigger than ours; in Europe, they’ve gone from 127 cases in 2022 to more than 35,000 in 2024. Routine vaccination rates went down almost everywhere.”
Mediscam Explained
In its simplest form, the tax maneuver works like this: When a Medicaid patient goes to the hospital, the federal government and state usually share the costs. The ratio varies from one state to another, depending on how poor the state is, but the federal government often pays around 60 percent of the bill.
Source: Mark Levine at Bloomberg