- How the war of words over vaccines is affecting doctors and patients.
- When it comes to cognitive capacities, the 70s are indeed the new 50s: A person who was 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive health score as a 53-year-old in 2000.
- New RFK rule would pay specialists less and primary care doctors more.
- CMS: the health care sector will grow faster than GDP — growing from 17.6 percent of GDP in 2023 to 20.3 percent in 2033.
- 80% of the money nonprofit hospitals get through public tax breaks is not being used for charity care.
- Paragon: health provisions in the BBB.
- The Valley of Death, with the median time from FDA approval of a novel technology to Medicare coverage is 5.7 years.
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Thursday Links
- David Henderson on the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
- Bill Gates: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) together have saved about 37 million people since 2003. (WSJ)
- Joe Klein: It is hard to win elections when you hate your country.
- Andrew Biggs: Social Security is in trouble because the initial benefit is wage indexed.
- High school graduation rates are up; SAT scores are down. (We are handing out diplomas to students who can’t read.)
NYT: Medicare to Curtail Abusive Spending on Hyper-Expensive Bandages
Going after Medicare abuse is like playing whack a mole. Just when you think you have made some headway another mole pops out. The Biden Administration, and now the Trump Administration, is moving to limit the use – and limit the price paid – for so-called skin substitutes in Medicare. Skin substitutes are newfangled bandages.
Wednesday Links
- “One recent estimate has 24 percent of women in the United States currently having or being treated for depression [with antidepressants] compared to 11 percent of men.”
- Study: universal basic income trial had zero impact on child outcomes.
- Biden’s Chief Economist has decided that federal debt is a problem.
- A Greenland shark can live 400 years or more.
- OpenEvidence’s proprietary algorithms search millions of peer-reviewed publications, including in top journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association to help doctors find the best answers fast, with full citations to papers so doctors can read more for themselves. The software is free for verified doctors to use and makes money through advertising—much like Google does.