You would think with Covid driving so many people to the emergency rooms, hospitals would be in great financial shape. Yet in 2022 hospitals experienced the worst financial performance in memory. Jeff Goldsmith writes:
Category: Cost of Healthcare
The Future Looks Bleak
To ensure that the federal government’s borrowing capacity does not become exhausted within the next 25 to 50 years, the growth in federal health care spending must be reduced relative to baseline spending. I provide two scenarios that would provide additional borrowing capacity. These would require federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the insurance subsidies to be reduced by at least 7.5 percent of baseline spending, or 0.5 percent of the economy, over the 2025 to 2034 budget window.
Beginning structural reforms sooner rather than later will allow a path of continuous growth in the budget for health programs while avoiding much larger, drastic cuts in the future as well as problematic future tax increases, inflation, and higher interest rates.
Friday Links
- What Jimmy Carter got right: deregulation that saved consumers hundreds of billions of dollars.
- More than $200 Million in New York City-Purchased COVID Gear Auctioned Off For Just $500,000. Thousands of ventilators de Blasio commissioned for $12 million sell as scrap metal for less than $25K.
- The White House favors an “AI Bill of Rights.” Rights for the robot? No. Rights for people who want to opt out of interacting with the robot.
- Study: Vaccine mandates did nothing to stop Covid spread.
- Health Affairs: Abortions are “health care.”
Thursday Links
- Transparency: Hospitals still don’t want you to know how much you are going to have to pay. CMS has issued nearly 500 warning notices and over 230 requests for corrective action. The penalty for non-compliance in 2022 is up to $5,500 per day (more than $2 million a year).
- Hospitals still don’t want you to know what you are going to be charged: Nearly 500 get a warning from CMS.
- Study: 57 percent of nurses felt “exhausted” over the past two weeks, 43 percent felt “burned out,” and just 20 percent said they felt valued.
- Light pollution: one-third of the people in the world can’t see the Milky Way. (NYT)
- Not following the science. The most rigorous and comprehensive study to date: masks don’t work. CDC tells schools to require them anyway.