- Ross Douthat: the case against marijuana.
- Evidence that corporate ownership improves healthcare outcomes in a setting where patients have access to service pricing and quality information – the market for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF).
- Everything you want to know about when gays can donate blood.
- The new mammogram recommendations can potentially lead to a lot of unnecessary, and potentially harmful, care.
- The downside of privacy regulations: As of November 2021, at least 70% of healthcare providers still exchange medical information by fax because historically there has been no option to send EMRs using modern internet services.
- Why more regulation leads to more monopoly power.
Category: Policy & Legislation
Friday Links
- New England Journal of Medicine article praises the separation of medical students by race while calling for the establishment of white-only affinity groups whose members should be “held accountable.”
- New York City Council: Employers can’t refuse to hire someone because they are fat.
- Austin City Council: Employers can no longer object to employee hair styles.
- Why are state regulations stricter on Children’s tattoos than they are on children sex changes? (WSJ)
- Drug shortages are nearing an all-time high — leading to rationing. (NYT)
- Half the people in New York City cannot afford to live there: necessary take-home pay: $100K. (NYT)
Thursday Links
- The AMA’s Advancing Health Equity guide is a joke. But after the laughter dies, it is also very sad.
- British Columbia to send thousands of Canadian cancer patients to Washington state for treatment.
- Paragon: Medicare’s venture into “value based care” has done little except add administrative burden and a set of quality metrics that are easily gamed and don’t translate into better or more efficient care.
- Trump’s executive order allowing employers to fund individually owned health insurance is taking hold.
Addicted to Drug Money: States Not Spending Opioid Settlement Funds on Addiction Treatment
In was the dawn of the 21st Century when untreated pain became a public health priority. In 1990 Dr. Mitchel Max, then president of the American Pain Society, authored an editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine lamenting the lack of progress treating pain over the previous two decades. Within a few years Joint Commission jumped on the bandwagon and published Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign. Thus began America’s experiment in aggressive pain treatment and its descent into opioid addiction and overdose deaths.