Doctors cannot afford to offer uncompensated services. Nor can they raise their fees. The only way they can pay the rent and other costs is by seeing more patients and spending less time with each of them.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
WSJ: PBMs and Drug Rebates Perpetuate the High Cost of Drugs
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) includes provisions to force down the price of medications paid for by Medicaid, Medicare and consumers. The mechanisms to force down drug prices are convoluted as one would expect, as are the strategies by drug companies, drug plan managers and health insurers to prevent losing profits.
Saturday Links
- The case against taxing the wealthy to save Social Security.
- AEI’s budget projection: “We project that debt-to-GDP will be 135 percent in 2032 and 268 percent in 2052, compared to CBO’s 112 percent and 177 percent, respectively.
- Drugs to treat obesity and diabetes: “We estimate that net prices received by drugmakers are 48–78 percent lower than list prices… faced by some consumers.”
- Diabetes contributed roughly $296 billion to excess health care spending in 2023.
- Social Security replaces about 54 percent of the pre-retirement earnings of an average wage worker. (This is higher than what Social Security tells us.)
Friday Links
- How UnitedHealth used secret rules to keep Medicare Advantage patients out of rehab.
- Former NIH director on lockdowns: You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.
- Medicare Advantage enrollment: As of 2021, 59% of Black Medicare beneficiaries, 67% of Hispanic beneficiaries, and 55% of Asian and Pacific Islander beneficiaries were enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan as compared with 43% of White beneficiaries. Left out of the headline: These disparities mirror the same disparities found in traditional Medicare.
- Pandemic unemployment insurance benefits: Once they ended, the flow of people from unemployment to work increased by two thirds.
- How Medicare determines what it pays for medical care.