- Suicide, anxiety, and depression numbers are rising among teens. Is social media the problem? Observation: “Every child uses social media but not every child has a mental health problem.”
- Are children the victims of Medicaid expansion?
- Several studies have linked Medicaid expansion to longer wait times for appointments, slower ambulance response times, and greater delays in the emergency room.
- The bipartisan tax deal increases both marriage bonuses and marriage penalties.
- CBO: Budget deficits will average $2.0 trillion per year – or 5.7 percent of GDP – over the next decade.
- How can a silk patch replace a hypodermic needle?
Category: COVID-19 and Public Health
Does Society Hate Old People?
Kaiser Health News (now called KHN) published an article titled, “Do We Simply Not Care About Old People?” The inflammatory headline was about the high death toll of older adults from covid, saying:
The covid-19 pandemic would be a wake-up call for America, advocates for the elderly predicted: incontrovertible proof that the nation wasn’t doing enough to care for vulnerable older adults.
Domestic Companies Producing PPE Want More Subsidies to Stay Afloat
Think back a little over four years ago in the late Spring of 2020. Covid was taking off and nobody really knew how to stop it. Everyone was advised to stay home and when you had to venture out you were required to wear a mask. Masks were hard to find. Latex gloves were hard to find. Hand sanitizer was difficult to find and toilet paper was too. A major problem during Covid was not just that demand had skyrocketed for protective gear (called PPE) but also protective gear was mostly made overseas in China. Global transportation ground to a halt making it hard to access PPE from abroad even if there was the capacity abroad to manufacture it.
Saturday Links
- More evidence that genes trump social factors in explaining behavioral outcomes.
- CDC: The new Covid vaccine is 54% effective.
- Len Schaeffer:
The level of variation in our health care system is unbelievable. You could be hospitalized for nine days in New York and for three days in California with the same diagnosis—and those differences would have no impact on outcomes. There is no other industry in the world that uses so many different approaches to the same thing and in which these differences don’t relate to better results. (Article is interesting throughout)
- “Imagine an integrated device that includes an insulin pump, a glucometer, and software that uses photos from a smartphone to carb count your food and dose insulin… The FDA’s regulatory framework is ill-equipped to deal [with this].”
- Is there a relationship between Medicaid expansion and the opioid crisis?
- The US has 36 million Health Savings Accounts, covering 72 million people.