Many states have passed laws limiting prior authorization. Physicians hate prior authorization and claim insurers and health plans use it to ration care. I tend to be more sympathetic to prior authorization because in an industry where patients are insulated from the cost of their care, there needs to be some checks and balances over unnecessary care and care that is unnecessarily expensive. I often tell the story about the time my wife unknowingly tried to schedule a CT scan at a hospital outpatient clinic near our house.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Monday Links
- Penn Wharton warning: the US is headed toward default.
- Aaron Carroll: misinformation about health care has a very long history.
- Will shaming hospitals make them lower their charges?
- How progressives thought about race – 100 years ago.
- The worst police abuses do not involve accidental shootings.
- More on why marriage matters.
Saturday Links
- Biden supports striking health care workers over patients. Actually, the president appears to believe every worker should get more pay – meaning, I suppose, we should all pay more for everything we buy.
- Lancet study on warming: In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing and service sectors were lost to heat exposure.
- Sen. Tim Scott was right: Thomas Sowell points out that in 1960—almost 100 years after slavery—only 22% of African-American children grew up in homes with one parent. Thirty years later, after the expansion of the welfare state under the Great Society, that percentage had tripled. (WSJ)
- Should medical debt be banned from credit reports? (NYT)
- In the 1950s and 1960s, the Army used blowers on top of buildings and in the backs of station wagons to spray a potential carcinogen into the air surrounding a St. Louis housing project where most residents were Black. More here
Paying People Not to Work
The March 2021 American Rescue Plan … extended a program that added $300 each week to a state’s standard [unemployment] benefit. A separate part of the bill expanded eligibility … to workers such as the self-employed.