The risk of mental decline increases with age. Dementia and mental decline have been in the news lately largely because of the presidential election. President Biden will be 82 by the time the next president is sworn in, while former President Trump will be 78. By the time the next presidential term ends, they will be 86 and 82 respectively.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Friday Links
- Over half the new jobs in January’s report are in government or health care.
- Smoking is worse than you’ve been told. Long lasting effects after you quit.
- What happens when doctors become hospital employees? Medicare patients’ use of non-hospital sources for chemotherapy declined by 14% from 2015 to 2021, and chemotherapy performed in hospitals increased by 21%. More than half of Medicare chemotherapy patients now receive their treatments in hospitals, where the prices are higher.
- How health insurance eats into wages. Premiums for a family made up about 8% of employees’ compensation in 1988. If they stayed at that level for the next 32 years, a typical family would have earned an additional $8,774 in 2019. The cumulative value of lost earnings tops $125,000.
Tuesday Links
- NYU Lagone Health is offering virtual urgent care as an alternative to the emergency room.
- Matt Holt: while primary care is skimping by, hospitals have so much money they are paying their senior people million dollar salaries and starting hedge funds.
- Direct Primary Care: Society of Actuaries study: ER visit are 40% lower.
- Direct Primary Care case study: DPC reduced health plan spending by 54%, employees’ out-of-pocket costs at the point of care by 30%, and employee premiums by 20%.
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.