It is true that Americans pay the highest price for drugs of any country. If you want to know why, buy an economics textbook and read up on price discrimination, price controls and the effect of third-party payment on medical prices.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Friday Links
- Tyler Cowen on the three university presidents testifying before Congress: “Overall this was a dark day for American higher education.”
- Biden Plans to Revoke Drug Patents to Lower Prices.
- How doctors get paid.
- Study: Children with liberal parents are more likely to suffer mental health problems.
- How does having too much to drink or eating a large meal prior to bed affect your sleep? A sleep tracker can tell you.
- A new way of harvesting organs – doctors take them before the donor is brain dead.
Drug Donation Programs Slowly Spread Across the Country
When I was a kid we never threw out unused prescription medications. Antibiotics and pain relievers were especially always saved and used, sometimes not necessarily by the person to whom they were prescribed. Of course, drugs that had a very specific purpose like my mother’s thyroid medication were not shared for obvious reasons. If a prescription brand or strength was change the old pills would languish in the bathroom medicine cabinet. As unorthodox as this may sound, it’s catching on with states, sort of.
Wednesday Links
- Against FDA regulation of lab tests.
- More than $185 million of Covid relief money has been approved for projects related to golf courses. The Biden Treasury Department wants to let states spend $90 billion more of “leftover emergency money.”
- In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, per capita mortality varied by more than a hundredfold across countries, despite most implementing similar nonpharmaceutical interventions.
- Shouldn’t hospitals know if their patients are dead? “About 19 percent of deceased patients overall were deemed alive in their records. What’s more, dead patients received more than 200 telephone calls and 300 portal messages after their death.”