- CBO: competition and price transparency are the best ways to lower private sector health care costs.
- Nurse fired for refusing to admit she’s a racist. (WSJ)
- Against hormone therapy for children.
- When the dangers of one type of drug addiction become widely known, teenagers switch to another addictive drug. (NYT)
- Why did McKinsey get into the addiction business? (NYT)
Category: Cost of Healthcare
The White House’s Vote-Buying Hunger Games
President Joe Biden announced his Administration’s plan to end hunger by 2030.
President Joe Biden said his administration will commit more than $8 billion in private and public sector funding as part of its plans to end hunger and reduce diet-related disease by 2030.
“I really know we can do this, end hunger in this country, by the year 2030 and lower the toll that diet-related diseases take on far too many Americans,” Biden said at a conference on hunger, nutrition and health in Washington on Wednesday. “This goal is within our reach. Just look at how far we’ve come on child poverty.”
Friday Links
- Health Execs behaving badly.
- The increase in mortality among middle-aged, non-Hispanic whites is almost entirely driven by the bottom 10% of the education distribution.
- University of Rochester study: the main arguments against telemedicine are all wrong.
- Why can’t the media tell the truth about climate change?
- Study: The overall use of the twenty-three “low-value” medical services across all fifty-one states amounted to $3.7 billion over 10 years. At less than 1/10 of 1% of overall spending, not clear why we should be worried.
- Federal advisory group recommends that all Americans 19 to 64 be screened for “anxiety.”
- No diversity here: Women who get “long Covid” outnumber men by as much as four to one.
Texas Hospitals Thrive While Saddling Patients with High Medical Bills and Debt
Kaiser Health News and the Urban Institute looked at areas with high medical debt and compared them to hospitals’ profit margins. It profiled the North Texas region surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth.
Of the nation’s 20 most populous counties, none has a higher concentration of medical debt than Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth. Second is Dallas County, credit bureau data shows.
Does a lot of medical debt indicate that a Urban Institute are struggling to pay their medical bills and the local hospitals are struggling as a result? That was not the case according to the analysis.