The purpose of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive financial practices. President Obama signed legislation creating the CFPB in 2010. Since its inception the agency has worked to rein in abusive practices at banks, student loans taken out to attend substandard for-profit universities and abuses at mortgage brokers. Lately the federal agency has taken aim at hospital debt collectors.
Category: Policy & Legislation
Monday Links
- How the Eugenics Movement found its way into American law. (Missing: the word “progressive.”)
- Cato: 8 reforms for Medicaid. Missing: giving money to the beneficiaries and allowing direct primary care.
- “Two years into the pandemic, more than 150,000 US nursing home residents had died of COVID-19 – roughly 10% of the total U.S. nursing home population. Sadly, well-intentioned lockdowns made things worse.”
- Share of GDP spent on long term care varies from under 1% in Spain to over 4% in the Netherlands. Lots of data from a study by Gruber, et. al.
Saturday Links
- Eugene Steuerle on why Donald Trump and other wealthy people like to borrow. Recommended
- New evidence that Covid was developed in a lab. (WSJ)
- There are over 10,000 known rare diseases and most don’t have a drug approved to treat them. The FDA has approved over 19,000 prescription drugs. Could AI find cures in the 19K to treat the 10K? (WSJ)
- After Morley Safer attributed France’s lower rate of heart disease to drinking red wine in a 1991 segment of 60 Minutes, red wine sales in the United States jumped 40 percent. New research says that’s all wrong.
- AFP: What is an HSA? (30 sec video)
- AFP: How does an HSA benefit you? (30 sec video)
- Members of Congress are upset that Pfizer gave a $50 donation to Dying with Dignity, Canada.
- Danger at the beach: Sand holes are about as deadly as sharks.
Surprise: Health Care Demand Curves are Negatively Sloped
A new working paper on the effects of Medigap on total per-person spending over the period 1999 to 2012 confirms what many other prior studies have shown, which is that Medigap drives up costs and service use. According to the study’s authors, those enrolled in Medigap plans incurred $2300 more in annual per person costs (in 2014 dollars) compared to similarly situated FFS enrollees who did not have supplemental insurance. Medicare’s added costs were $400 per person per year….
The authors conclude that the most likely explanation is that lowering the price of medical services to zero (or near zero) induces more demand. It is a commonsense interpretation. Patients will opt to get more services, and the clinicians taking care of them will be more inclined to offer them too, if insurance is paying the entire bill.
Source: James Capretta, AEI