- Did the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) censor a meta study showing that lock downs had no effect on covid?
- A smart pill — the size of a blueberry! — can be used to automatically detect key biological molecules in the gut that suggest problems, and wirelessly transmit the information in real time.
- Robin Hansen: World population will peak in about thirty years, and then will likely fall by half every generation or two.
- How the government sets Medicare prices: it’s “a pattern of combining dated, imprecise cost reports with idiosyncratic and opaque adjustments that were not constructed to guarantee the best outcomes for the dollars spent.”
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Jindal & Katebi: Better Ways to Lower Drug Costs
Former Louisiana governor (also former HHS secretary) Bobby Jindal and Charlie Katebi wrote an editorial in the Washington Examiner explaining how to rein-in high drug costs. To start with they don’t like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). President Biden championed the IRA as a way for Medicare to lower drug costs for a small, insignificant number of hyper expensive drugs. For the uninitiated, the IRA allows Medicare to identify 10 high-cost drugs and negotiate the cost down, using punitive excise taxes if drug companies refuse. Jindal and Katebi have a point. The IRAs price negotiation formula is a Rube Goldberg-type of policy mechanism that only Democrats’ legislative writers would think up.
Friday Links
- From the Committee to Unleash Prosperity: “Why is the U.S. government spending $1.7 billion purchasing 20 million covid vaccine doses for kids?” and “Gavin Newsom Admits He Was Wrong, Wrong, Wrong on COVID Lockdowns.”
- A scholarly argument for e-cigs.
- CTUP Question: How can Washington spend $1.2 trillion ($9,000 per American household) on anti-poverty programs and yet still have nearly 40 million people in poverty?
- Opioid update: The 300 counties that received the most doses of prescription pain pills from 2006 to 2013 later had the highest death rate from illicit opioids.
- Peter Coy reviews the Cato book, “Superabundance.”
- US per capita income growth rate for the past 150 years: remarkably steady at 2%.
- Nearly half of adults under 30 do not have a primary care doctor.
Bidenomics
Real incomes at every decile were lower and income inequality was greater than in 2019. Americans in the bottom 10% of earners were 6.3% poorer last year than in 2019 while those in the top 5% saw their incomes decline 4.1%.