- California state health insurance to cover sex changes for illegal immigrants.
- Good news about the new Covid strain.
- 56% of the economically most impactful technologies come from just two U.S. locations: Silicon Valley and the Northeast Corridor.
- Book: There is a worldwide epidemic of diabetes and it has one cause: carbohydrates.
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
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.
Monday Links
- During the pandemic, government payments for social benefits rose by $1.5 trillion, or 47%, between 2019 and 2021. At the same time, the official poverty rate rose to 11.6% from 10.5%.
- Using a consistent measure of poverty, AEI researchers find that only 1.6% of the population lives in poverty, well below the official poverty rate of 10.5%.
- The case for a value added tax.
- Likely scenarios if the government seizes drug company patents: They’re all bad.
- New technology can identify genetic defects before Invitro Fertilization begins.
- “Canadian woman is diagnosed with cancer, told she has 2 years to live at most, that she is not a candidate for surgery but would she like medical help committing suicide? She declines, comes to the United States, spends a lot of money, and is treated within weeks.”
Wednesday Links
- Against FDA regulation of lab tests.
- More than $185 million of Covid relief money has been approved for projects related to golf courses. The Biden Treasury Department wants to let states spend $90 billion more of “leftover emergency money.”
- In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, per capita mortality varied by more than a hundredfold across countries, despite most implementing similar nonpharmaceutical interventions.
- Shouldn’t hospitals know if their patients are dead? “About 19 percent of deceased patients overall were deemed alive in their records. What’s more, dead patients received more than 200 telephone calls and 300 portal messages after their death.”