- “We find that one-quarter of food-insecure households fall within the top three quintiles of the income distribution and that food-insecure households spend about as much as food-secure households do on food per week.”
- Biden lowers the hammer on short-term insurance: plans can only last 3 months with a 1 month renewal.
- This year alone, the federal government will spend more than $1.1 trillion to fund more than 130 anti-poverty programs. State and local governments will kick in an additional $700 billion, pushing total anti-poverty spending to more than $1.8 trillion. If all that money were given to the poor it would equal $47,493 per person.
- Bob Moffett authors another review of Modernizing Medicare.
- There have been 70 legal changes to Obamacare so far.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Medicare to Cover Some Costly Weight-Loss Drugs (that’s both good and bad)
The first Medicare health plans announced they will cover the weight-loss drug, Wegovy for certain patients with heart disease. By law, Medicare is not allowed to cover drugs solely for weight loss. Elevance (operates many Blue Cross and Blue Shield health plans), Kaiser Permanente and CVS Health are the first Medicare plans to cover weight loss drugs for health reasons, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Saturday Links
- How an (apparently) serious study of a vegan diet became fodder for a blatant propaganda film.
- Medicaid’s claim denials are higher than in Medicare or commercial insurance.
- GAO: Improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid top $100B. The number for Medicare Advantage is $17B – a little more than half of the total for traditional Medicare.
- Oprah ignores the downside of weight loss drugs.
- Jim Capretta reviews Obamacare – including all the provisions that either didn’t work or have been repealed.
- After completely screwing up Covid tests, the FDA now wants control of all other laboratory developed tests.
Friday Links
- California had the worst job growth of any state.
- How Medicare pays providers: for the fiscal year that began on October 1, the new rule for hospital inpatient care is just short of 800 pages, with three columns of text for most of the published pages. The physician fee schedule and skilled nursing facilities rules for 2024 run 1227 and 147 pages, respectively.
- Other things equal, 3 psychological traits (competitiveness, risk tolerance, and confidence) lead to higher incomes.
- The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review determined that a cost-effective price for the newly approved gene therapy Lenmeldy is between $2.3M and $3.9M. Orchard Therapeutics, will be asking $4.25M.
- Why is colon cancer rising among young adults, but falling for seniors?