- A Fauci aide who taught a coworker how to destroy government records to avoid complying with FOIA requests is taking the Fifth before a congressional committee.
- The real issue in the port workers strike is not wages, it’s automation.
- Why McDonald’s burgers taste better (different?) outside the US.
- The nanny state: number of US counties in which government transfers are more than 25% of personal income.
- Humana tumbles as insurer faces $3 billion hit to revenue over lower Medicare star ratings (Statnews)
- Medicaid is no longer for the poor: Enrollment as a percentage of the U.S. population has more than tripled, rising from around 8% in the late 1980s to nearly 27% by 2022, while the poverty rate remained relatively stable.
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Monday Links
- Free covid tests are back.
- Governments at all levels spend nearly $2 trillion annually to fight poverty (not counting payments related to COVID-19). Stretching back to 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson first declared his War on Poverty, anti‐poverty spending has totaled more than $30 trillion.
- Tyler Cowen: It is estimated that about 40% of Americans are obese. If the government paid for those drugs for everyone who might benefit from them, it could cost more than $1 trillion annually, almost as much as the US spends on Medicare each year, (Bloomberg)
- Study: 60-year-old rural men can now expect to live two years less than their urban counterparts – a gap that’s nearly tripled from two decades ago.
- Study: Both moderate and light drinkers experience more cancer deaths than occasional drinkers.
Wednesday Links
- “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Here is what that means today if you are covered by Centene, the largest provider of Obamacare insurance in the country.
- Why the British economy is stagnating: “It is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.”
- Most anti-smoking drugs don’t work and the drug companies aren’t anxious to develop new ones. Overly strict FDA regulations are partly to blame. (STAT News)
- New York’s Covid tsar spent the pandemic preaching social distancing while attending raves and sex parties.
- “Healthcare is a centrally controlled market. It is both a monopoly—sole control of supply—and a monopsony—single determinant of demand.”
Tuesday Links
- The AMA says obesity is a disease. But the medical community has never provided a precise definition for obesity as a disease.
- The US does not have mini recessions. (Recommended)
- The per enrollee cost of Medicaid is higher than the average cost in employer plans in almost 20 states, sometimes by a considerable margin.
- Education fail: Not a single child tested proficient in math in 67 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 32 schools. So, what have the Illinois legislature and Governor JB Pritzker done about it? They shut down the Illinois Invest in Kids Scholarship program that allowed kids to attend private schools.
- Cato: Lessons from covid.