This year the cost of Obamacare for someone my age living in my North Texas county is roughly $10,000 for a $10,000 deductible. That means I would pay premiums of just over $800 a month in return for coverage that would cover nothing unless my health needs exceed $800 a month for the entire year. Assuming I spent more than $10,000 during the coverage period, the ACA plan would cover only $0.60 cents of every dollar I spend above my deductible.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Friday Links – 27 February 2026
- How Mark Cuban would run a hospital.
- More than 40 million people use ChatGPT for health care questions every day.
- “The cost of developing a new medicine has roughly doubled every nine years, while the number of drugs produced per research dollar has steadily declined.”
- Median family income rose by almost $2,400 after inflation in 2025.
Thursday Links – 26 February 2026
- Even for the healthy, income after taxes and transfers has been growing faster than market income.
- Interesting argument: Medical advances over the past 40 years have masked the epidemic of violence by lowering the murder rate by more than five times.
- Tyler Cowen’s vision of what an AI-dominated world would look like.
- Alysa Liu’s dad became a single father via surrogacy.
- Three ways countries around the world are taxing carbon. (The US is in the lower fourth– between South Africa and Uruguay. China falls even lower than the US. India is lower than China.
- More than 20 percent of US Olympic medals went to athletes who grew up or trained in Vermont.
- “Of all the foods we produce on Earth, beef is the No. 1 destroyer of forests, and especially rainforests.”
Move Over Dr. Google, You’re Being Replaced by Dr. ChatGPT Health
How are people filling in the information gap between physician visits? Data going back nearly 30 years shows patients flocking to the internet for information on diseases and conditions. Dr. Google is a euphemism for people using the search engine Google to query medical conditions. Nowadays patients have an even more powerful health information source: artificial chatbot ChatGPT Health.