A recent press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Florida blasted the headline, Fraud Scheme Involving Baby Formula Leads to 18-Year Federal Prison Sentences for Swindlers. Health care fraud in South Florida should come as no surprise. With its large Medicare population, South Florida is a haven for all manner of medical fraud…
Category: Policy & Legislation
A Health Reform Whose Time Has Come
The basic idea: take all the spending and tax subsidies we now provide to private health insurance and use that money to give every American not on a government health plan a refundable tax credit. This money could be used to purchase health insurance and make deposits to Health Savings Accounts, from which people could purchase health services directly. Rep. Pete Sessions has a bill that would do just that. More
Why “Testing to Treat” for Covid Isn’t Working
This is Larry Kotlikoff at Forbes:
We now have wonderful new drugs to treat COVID. Paxlovid, produced by Pfizer, is an example. But half of these medications aren’t being prescribed. Indeed, many go to waste, sitting on the shelves of pharmacies until their expiration dates.
Replacement Theory Didn’t Kill People in Buffalo
Mental illness did.
With the society wide surge of mental disorder during the pandemic, the U.S. has arrived at a moment of reckoning for a policy failure that has run like an open hydrant since the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s emptied the mental hospitals. The solution was supposed to be outpatient “community care.” It never happened.
Andrew Scull, author of a just-published book on psychiatry’s struggle to address mental illness (“Desperate Remedies,” recently reviewed in these pages), wrote a devastating critique last year of how politics and medicine have failed the mentally ill. “Community care,” he wrote, “was a shell game with no pea. In place of forcible confinement in publicly run asylums, the chronically mentally ill have been abandoned to their fate.”