When telephones began to appear in American homes and businesses physicians were one of the early adopters. As health insurance began to spread patients became more reluctant to pay out of pocket for services not covered by their health plans. For their part, health insurers were reluctant to reimburse for services outside the usual and customary practices. At some point midcentury doctors stopped routinely talking to their patients on the phone because nobody wanted to pay them for the service. If you stop and think about it nothing could be more inconvenient – and antiquated – than having to make a doctor’s appointment to record routine health information. What if your car speedometer could only reveal your speed once you pulled back into your driveway, and then only one snapshot in time during your most recent trip. Over time payer reluctance to reimburse for telemedicine began to slowly change and covid accelerated the transition.
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Saturday Links
- What a ransomware cyberattack is doing to the heath care system.
- Almost every government intervention in response to Covid was wrong.
- Biden’s budget: no plan for Social Security.
- Canadian health minister: You have a duty not to purchase private care: “Going and paying your way out of your circumstances creates a terrible malady for our system.”
- After the collapse of cost-plus financing, private payers began to pay the same way Medicare pays.
Thursday Links
- The Covid lockdowns appear to have caused a spike in alcohol related deaths.
- Why don’t we see dynamic pricing in health care?
- Why is Medicaid paying for Housing?
- 11 percent of U.S. 12 graders report using delta-8 (a psychoactive substance derived from hemp that is chemically very similar to delta-9-THC, the molecule in marijuana responsible for causing the high associated with taking cannabis).
- Social Security and Medicare spending are set to nearly double by 2033.
- Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff got the big things right on COVID, more than perhaps any other academic expert in America. He was censored on Twitter, fired by Harvard and fired by the CDC.
Wednesday Links
- Kaiser does a deep dive into doctors billing for email.
- Of eight states that have not recovered job losses for Covid, seven are blue.
- Joe Biden’s budget: like the original (2020) budget, this one would lower output and worker wages. Also the $400,000 threshold (below which no taxes) is not indexed—so eventually the Biden taxes will reach everyone on the income ladder.
- Biden’s budget v. the House Republican budget.
- A completely bureaucratic view of when patient preferences should be honored.
- Claude 3 Opus Fails Steve Landsburg’s Economics Exam.