Late last summer Pamela Ludwig, owner of a Franklin, Tennessee firm that goes by the name Pretty in Pink Boutique, began receiving calls from angry Medicare enrollees across the country. The seniors were mad that their Medicare accounts had been charged for urinary catheters they did not need, nor had received. About the same time 1,300 miles away in El Paso, Texas Erika Tavarez too began receiving angry emails and then a visit from the FBI. She had recently sold a durable medical equipment business, also called Pretty in Pink, that provided prothesis for breast cancer survivors.
Category: Policy & Legislation
Monday Links
- Steuerle on the marriage tax: marital penalties are marriage vow penalties easily avoided by those who don’t believe in the vows.
- Lookism: how you look may affect your outcome in courts of law. HT: Tyler
- Margaret Mead was an early LSD experimenter with CIA funding.
- A little appreciated fact about federal government finances: for the past 50 years federal revenues have averaged about 18% of GDP and have never reached 20% — despite many many changes in the tax code. Could this represent a “law” of public finance?
Saturday Links
- Deficit spending: Trump was bad, but Biden has been worse.
- Cause of inflation: Trump bears some blame, but again, Biden has been worse.
- “The Biden administration wants to throw a grenade into this carefully balanced ecosystem for research, development, and commercialization of a new medical technology.”
- We may be able to use CRISPR to treat rare inflammatory diseases.
Friday Links
- “You can very clearly halve your children’s risk of schizophrenia through polygenic selection, which costs only a few hundred dollars if you’re already doing IVF…. In a decade or two you can probably eliminate the risk entirely.”
- Roughly 90 percent of Americans are effectively blocked from opening an HSA.
- How to create HSAs in the Obamacare Exchanges. (National Review)
- Americans who trust the government to do the right thing most of the time: 10% Elites: 79% Super Elites: 89%. Maybe that’s because the elites run the government.
- What the future holds for weight loss drugs. (Bloomberg)
- Have economists oversold the idea of “moral hazard”?