- Does lead in the air affect learning in school?
- Stephen Pinker: The development of artificial general intelligence is incoherent and not achievable.
- Increased access to physicians results in better health – at least in Nigeria.
- If the estimates from Statista Consumer Marketing Research are accurate, from 2020 to 2022 the world bought 928 billion masks at a cost of $389 billion — most of them made of plastic. I wonder how much of the plastic ended up in the ocean?
- Oops. The Inflation Reduction Act will increase taxes on millions of Americans earning less than $400,000, despite the president’s repeated promises not to do that. And that’s only for starters.
Category: Policy & Legislation
Monday Links
- The IRA bill threatens orphan drugs.
- Study finds links between the popular zero-calorie sugar substitute erythritol and an increased risk of cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke.
- But the study has limits. (NYT)
- Death on demand: Canadian euthanasia is killing about 27 people a day on average — over 10,000 a year.
How to Create Transparent Pricing
James Capretta and David Bernstein (AEI) recommend these changes for CMS:
- Require transparent, “all in” prices for standardized services required to fully complete a clinical intervention.
- Require all providers to participate in this bundled pricing system.
- The prices posted for these services should be “walk up” prices available to all patients, irrespective of their insurance status.
- Require insurers to make available to their enrollees the dollar value of their median out-of-network rates, so that patients could then apply those payments from their insurers to any provider of their choosing.
- An additional option would be to allow patients to place the dollars saved by selecting lower-priced providers into tax-free health savings accounts (HSAs) for future use.
The British NHS: Don’t Get Cancer
NHS sets a goal of providing the first treatments within two months of a confirmed diagnosis. In September 2019, the NHS fell short of this goal, with only 78.7 percent of cancer patients receiving their first treatment in that time frame. By September 2022, the timeliness of cancer treatment had eroded further, with only 60.5 percent of new cancer patients receiving treatment within the time frame called for in NHS guidance.