Warning: This post is déjà vu all over again. Hospitals are growing. There used to be hospitals in every town. Now there are two or three major health care systems that dominate every region. As hospitals grow bigger in size so do their prices. The Wall Street Journal summed this phenomenon saying, “As Hospitals Grow, So Does Your Bill.”
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Friday Links
- Health economists like the idea of giving Medicaid money to the beneficiaries as a cash grant. But they are weak on specifics.
- Progressive groups want to kill the Trump reform that created employer-paid personal and portable health insurance. So far, Biden is resisting.
- Paragon Health Institute has identified ten ways the tax system affects the health care system, along with recommendations for reform.
- All the news about the rise in maternal mortality was fake news!
- Other possible fake stories: declining geographical mobility and rising teen mental health problems.
- The cost of uncompensated medical care for illegal immigrants in Florida is greater than $566 million, resulting from 54,443 hospital admissions and emergency room visits.
- Does the NIH fund a “lot of small crappy trials”?
Doctors Face Conflicts of Interest from Drugmaker Payments
Patients love free samples. However, there really is nothing truly free in our health care system. That free drug sample is an expensive branded medication when it comes time to refill your prescription. Generic drugs are not available as free samples. Only branded drugs that drugmakers are trying to promote are.
The War on Poverty Bred Dependency, including Hospitals, Clinics, Doctors, Drugmakers, etc.
Whenever there are societal problems there are always ambitious politicians who seek to fill a need. If you assume the desire to alleviate poverty and inequity is solely the purview of Western democracies, you would be wrong. Just study political economy and you will find that despots often use poverty and inequity to seize power and maintain it.