There is an old idiom in American English, “he shut the barn door after the horse has bolted.” The saying refers to someone who initiates preventive measures after it is too late. This is another way of saying an action was too little, too late. This analogy applies to a new initiative of the federal government to root out anticompetitive behavior in the health care industry.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Monday Links
- Arnold Kling: My model of nonprofits says that they please donors without necessarily accomplishing anything.
- The increase in pedestrian deaths is not caused by larger vehicles.
- Making medical school tuition free won’t solve the shortage of primary care physicians.
- Why a full body MRI is not a good idea even if it’s free.
- Newer antibiotics are safer and more effective. So why aren’t doctors prescribing them?
Saturday Links
- Paragon: The lifetime benefits the average senior will receive from Medicare will soon reach $750,000, after paying only $200,000 in taxes.
- Should pooled have a property/privacy right in their own brain waves? (NYT)
- How restrictive are the networks of Medicare Advantage plans?
- Latin American immigrants are starting businesses at more than twice the rate of the U.S. population as a whole.
- Trend in state health reforms: regulating instead of markets.
- Why does mortality go down in recessions?
STAT News: Nonprofit Hospitals Should Pay Taxes on Profits
The phrase nonprofit does not mean nonprofit organizations do not earn profits. Any organization that loses money every single year will soon go out of business. At the very least nonprofit organizations must break even. Nonprofit status is a tax election. It means in theory the organization is supposed to plow all profits back into a charitable mission, rather than distribute profits to shareholders (of which there are none in a nonprofit organization). In reality nonprofit hospitals plow most of their profits into expansion.