Category: Policy & Legislation

Saturday Links – 10 October 2026

Posted on by John C. Goodman

California’s proposed billionaire tax could be imposed on other taxpayers with much lower incomes.

Are Food Stamps making poor children fat?

Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirement is working.

Diet sodas are no worse for you than water.

“In the past three months, more than 426,000 posts on several platforms mentioned medical bills, advice against paying them, tips for negotiating them down and related topics.”

Perverse economic incentives for private equity hospital buyers. (But those incentives were there, long before PE came on the scene.)

The federal government is borrowing one-quarter of what it spends.

Urban hospital are closing at the same rate as rural ones. (WaPo)

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Thursday Links – 8 October 2026

Posted on by John C. Goodman

KFF: Two-thirds of US adults support Medicare for all.

Health care puzzle: Where did the word ”reimbursement” come from? And, why are we still using it?

The murder rate last year in the US was the lowest it has been since 1900.

Kennedy: AI is much better informed than any doctor.

Cancer drugs made by genetic testing are often more effective with fewer side effects, but patients are often not told about them.

Former Biden CMS official Kristi Martin, a key architect of the IRA’s Part D changes and price controls:  the Part D market is “headed to a death spiral.”

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Wednesday Links – 7 October 2026

Posted on by John C. Goodman

Nearly a third of intended parents for surrogate babies in the US are international and some 40 per cent of those are from China.

Rural heath care’s greatest need: doctors licensed in other states.

“Homicide trends are due mostly to changes in the number of arguments and the odds a given argument had a gun present.”

There appears to have been a recent lab leak of pneumonic plague in Russia that killed a lab worker.

Do the elderly prefer robotic care to human care?

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Trump finds rampant noncitizen voting in … Ken Paxton’s Texas

Posted on by Merrill Matthews

Ken Paxton, call your office! President Trump has a report from the U.S. Census Bureau that purports to expose the states with the largest number of noncitizen voters in the 2020 election.

Texas comes in second with 2,500 alleged noncitizen voters — and the bureau says there’s more to come.

If true, state Attorney General Paxton needs to explain why more alleged noncitizen voters haven’t been charged.

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