Drugs are the most efficient of all medical therapies, representing only about 8.8% of national health expenditures. By contrast, at $864.6 billion in 2021, Americans spent more than twice as much on physician care and 3.5 times as much on hospital care. Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs are especially economical, most of which were once prescription drugs. OTC drugs represent between 1% and 2% of medical spending.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Monday Links
- How do PBMs make their money?
- After a woman dies of cancer she posthumously offers to buy up the medical debts of other patients.
- Scientists edit genes to control cholesterol.
- Gene editing can also prevent sickle cell, but Medicaid won’t pay for it. The Biden administration is partly to blame. (WSJ)
- Patients wait 13 hours for free health care.
Pay is One Reason for the Shortage of Primary Care Providers (there are other reasons too)
Kaiser Health News reports that compensation is key to fixing the primary care shortage. The article goes on to say that there are many reasons for the shortage of primary care physicians, but one is inescapable: compensation. Here is a profound quote from the KHN article:
Money talks.
Saturday Links
- How Obamacare denied one family’s daughter the cancer care she needed.
- Did a Fauci advisor intentionally delete or destroy records relating to the origins of COVID-19?
- Kings and Queens theory: as income goes up, fertility goes down.
- High-heat neighborhoods can be 5 to 20 degrees hotter than surrounding neighborhoods. And a lot of other facts I bet you don’t know,
- Trump’s “Opportunity Zones” (created by the 2017 tax reform bill) are producing disappointing results. Enterprise Zones were an idea imported from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain by Heritage Foundation scholar Stuart Butler. The original idea was to create mini-Hong Kongs in otherwise dilapidated areas. What happened was no deregulation, only tax cuts and subsidies. I predicted from day one that if all you do is offer tax cuts, the experiment will turn into a special interest scam and Hong Kong will never emerge from the rubble. It appears I was right.