What if we could detect almost all cancers in the earliest stages when less-invasive treatments mean lifesaving cures? The answer: Mortality rates — and health care costs — would plummet because most cancers could be cured or controlled using existing therapies.
The good news is this innovation exists today in the form of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) from one blood test. The bad news is we don’t have an Eisenhower administration determined to deliver a medical game-changer to as many Americans as possible.
Instead, we have a Biden administration — in the form of the Federal Trade Commission and Chair Lina Khan that Biden named to head it — standing in the way and creating an impenetrable barrier to access to millions of cancer patients.
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
AI Practicing Medicine
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb:
Artificial intelligence has the potential to help solve some of the most frustrating problems in health care. Clinicians may use it to stratify patients more precisely according to their personal risk and to identify increasingly tailored treatments that simultaneously account for a patient’s clinical history, genomic profile, and phenotypic characteristics. The combination of statistics and weighted observations in a neural network can be highly predictive. This is true even though each output for an individual patient is likely to differ from any other patient in a validation model, and even though the variables, when taken individually, are not likely to be nearly as predictive.
Friday Links
- Could redistribution of income make people healthier? Evidence that the answer is “yes.”
- 330 COVID-19 articles in science journals have been retracted.
- NYC to help patients compare hospital costs. (NYT)
- More from Graboyes on sterilization.
- Steve Moore to Congress: ESG is harmful to retirees.
- Merck sues over IRA drug price negotiation: It’s an unconstitutional “taking” and it also “compels speech.”
Do Cash Payments Lower Death Rates? (The Left Says “Yes” but They’re Probably Wrong)
A popular idea among progressives on the left is a universal basic income (UBI). Supposedly, UBI is magic. It involves giving cash transfers to everyone without strings attached. According to scholars at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill:
The goals really differ, depending on the policymaker but also on who’s proposing it. I think for a lot of folks on the left, they see it as more a platform to build your life on. So it’s going to be there for you when you when you need it.