Is anxiety worse than in years past? That is hard to say with any evidence. The reality is that more people are confusing stress for anxiety, which makes the solution more difficult to identify.
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Thursday Links
- Scott Atlas: What we know and what we ignored about lockdowns.
- Waiting times for breast cancer surgery in the UK: more egalitarian than you would guess.
- It looks like ghost guns are not going to survive SCOTUS.
- Kamala has a new way to spend your money: home care for the elderly.
- NBER inequality study: The overlapping effects of different preferences for work and different levels of skills acquisition account for a hefty share of overall differences in lifetime earnings…. In other words, income inequality is in part a matter of choice rather than intractable economic or social forces.
- The United States spends only 5 to 7 cents of every health care dollar on primary care, versus 12 to 15 cents per dollar in most other high-income countries.
Thursday Links
- 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.
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.