- 50 years of US industrial policy. For those of you who think it is something new.
- Getting the priorities right: The Senate Budget Committee this session has held a total of 29 hearings, 15 of which were on climate and just 3 on the budget.
- Burgess: Under a “warranty approach” drug companies would refund a pre-negotiated amount of the drug’s price to the payor and patient if the latter’s health does not improve as expected. Under a “cost sharing approach,” the high upfront cost of gene therapy would be shared by subsequent insurers after the treatment succeeds.
- 10,000 commandments: Federal regulatory burdens cost $1.94 trillion per year, or $14,500 per household.
- Argument: drug shortages are caused by monopolistic middlemen. (Surely not the whole of the story.)
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Wednesday Links
- The physician shortage in our future.
- About one in five enrollees were disenrolled from Medicaid coverage at some point in 2023, but about 3/4ths of those either re-enrolled or found other insurance. Bottom line: the pandemic was an excuse to waste a lot of taxpayer money.
- Biden finally ends Covid mask mandate (imposed for federal facilities whenever a meaningless CDC metric is exceeded in a county).
- Why we don’t walk as much as we used to and why it matters.
- Against the idea that over-prescribing caused the opioid crisis.
Accelerated Approval Benefits Patients with Some Caveats
Nowadays more than four-in-five drugs granted accelerated approval are oncology drugs (85%). How well is it working? That depends. The program to grant patients early access to promising new drugs does just that: it is used a lot. Since it began in 1992, 290 drugs have been approved through the accelerated program. That works out to more than nine a year, on average, or nearly one a month. By any measure that accelerated access to new drugs.
Tuesday Links
- Tax Day remembrance: The top rate was once 91%. The corporate rate was 52%. The capital gains rate was 25%. The tax on top estates was 77%. But the tax take was only 16% of national income.
- Why is there a shortage of Adderall?
- How the DEA is creating drug shortages.
- Missile defense: Beginning in the Reagan administration and right up through the GW Bush administration, many experts and many more nonexperts claimed it couldn’t work. “You can’t hit a bullet with a bullet,” was a popular catchphrase. But on Sunday, that is exactly what US/Israeli defense forces did – with incredibly accurate precision.