- AAF study of the effects of Medicare’s coming drug price negotiations: fewer than 6 million beneficiaries – less than 10% of enrollees – will benefit at all and for those with any saving 69% of will save less than $300.
- Given Trump and Biden executive orders promoting the idea, why is it taking so long to allow states to import drugs from Canada?
- Health Affairs authors: giving insulin to patients for free is cost effective. So why don’t insurers – including Medicare Part D insurers – do that? I explained that months ago.
- How health care was rationed during the pandemic: Mississippi case study.
- Left-of-center Tax Policy Center: people earning less than $400,000 will pay more taxes under the new Biden budget proposal. A lot more taxes!
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
Fact Checking the CDC
We documented 25 instances when the CDC reported statistical or numerical errors. Twenty (80%) of these instances exaggerated the severity of the COVID-19 situation, 3 (12%) instances simultaneously exaggerated and downplayed the severity of the situation, one error was neutral, and one error exaggerated COVID-19 vaccine risks. The CDC was notified about the errors in 16 (64%) instances, and later corrected the errors, at least partially, in 13 (52%) instances.
Saturday Links
- Did you know that commercial airlines have to obey a speed limit?
- Digital therapies that sought FDA approval are expensive and in a regulatory morass. Is there a non-FDA approach that is possible?
- How worried should we be over a drug resistant fungus?
- Views on AI’s risk to humanity.
- Scott Sumner’s take: the worry is not that an intelligent AI will destroy the world. It’s that a depressed person will use AI to destroy the world.
- A different view of the Waco tragedy – one more sympathetic to the Branch Davidians.
Friday Links
- UK to speed up drug approval process. Needed: US acceptance of UK approvals in this country.
- GPT-4 passes the medical exam and then some.
- Why aren’t there any cost/benefit studies on bicycle lanes?
- Federal spending is up 40% since 2019. What are the drivers? They are not Social Security, Medicare or Defense.
- What have we learned after 13 years of Obamacare? If you make health insurance almost free, a lot of people will sign up. If you charge anywhere near the real cost, the market will spin into a death spiral.