- A death row inmate wants to donate a kidney. Texas won’t let him.
- How well does Paxlovid really work?
- Casey Mulligan and Joe Grogan defend PBMs. (WSJ)
- More on surprise bills: they occur in one in five emergency room visits and up to one in six in-network hospital stays.
- The Baduy, an indigenous group in Indonesia, have rejected vaccinations. Their Covid death toll: zero. (NYT)
- More on circadian rhythms: mice live longer if they eat on the right time schedule. (DMN)
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Wednesday Links
- How an economist thinks about abortion. Well, at least one economist.
- Why is Google investing in health care?
- Is developing Covid vaccines a profitable venture for drug companies? “The answer is a resounding ‘no’. In fact, in most cases, developing mRNA vaccines for a portfolio of emerging diseases would be a money loser.”
- How common is prior authorization?
- Price controls on insulin: The (intended?) result will that be that consumers will pay more, diabetes complications will get worse, and incumbent manufacturers will make more money.
- Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions. (HT: Tyler)
- Canada’s health care providers say their system is “collapsing.”
Will the Covid Emergency Ever End?
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO It’s supposed to end on Friday. But the Wall Street Journal says that continued extensions are the left’s best way of expanding the welfare state. One reason is that in March 2020 Congress barred states from kicking ineligible people off Medicaid rolls during the emergency in return for more federal funding. Medicaid enrollment has ballooned to…
JAMA: Tool Used to Ration Scarce Hospital Beds During Covid was Racially Biased
Racial bias in medicine takes many forms. It occurs when an older black guy sees his doctor, who doesn’t bother to prescribe drugs for hypertension because he assumes his patient will be noncompliant. Maybe it’s when a doctor doesn’t try to counsel her patient with high cholesterol because she assumes Hispanics suffer from with high cholesterol due to deeply entrench lifestyle behaviors. There are even debates that some treatment algorithms used in hospitals are biased due to biased programming.