- Is drug legalization the answer to the fentanyl crisis?
- Brazil recognizes a “right to be beautiful” and it subsidizes a half million cosmetic surgeries a year. (NYT)
- Trading places: In 2008 the EU’s economy was $16.2 trillion versus America’s $14.7 trillion. By 2022, the US economy had grown to $25 trillion, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8 trillion. (Financial Times)
- One reason: Europe banned fracking, while Obama encouraged it.
- Study: The CDC used unreliable data to support masks.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Americans Mistrust the Health Care System… for Good Reason
More than 30 years ago when the cost of health care was much lower compared to the average wage of American workers. In the late 1980s, for example, the percent of GDP spent on health care was just over 10%. It’s nearly 20% today. Around that time a politically motivated attorney general began looking into the amount of charity care provided by nonprofit hospitals within the state to make sure hospitals were providing enough to justify their tax breaks. The investigation ultimately found hospitals in the state were providing enough charity care to avoid further investigation, but perhaps the question should have been why was the bar set so low?
Monday Links
- The correlation between income and weight in advanced countries is driven almost entirely by women. (The Economist) Recommended but gated.
- Canadians wait an average of 14.8 weeks between seeing a specialist and getting treatment at a cost of $2,925 per patient in lost wages and productivity.
- The top 1% now pay more in income taxes than the bottom 95%.
- In Virginia, hospitals must disclose their prices before patients are admitted. (WSJ)
- Harvard scientists: drug cocktail can reverse aging.
Friday Links
- We have been advocating OTC birth control for years.
- Adverse selection problems in insurance markets go away if people must insure by household rather than as individuals. At least in Pakistan.
- Is your doctor employed by a private equity firm? (NYT)
- AARP Represents Health Insurers, Not Seniors
- Is compression of morbidity being reversed? Considering 300 diseases in the USA from 1990 vs. 2017, health span (health-adjusted life expectancy) grew by 2 years, but life expectancy grew by 3 years.
- The Health Care Blog goes wacko: “The greatest health equity threat to Medicaid – and Medicare – beneficiaries is the climate crisis.”