- “The projected $4.7 billion spent on migrant services in FY 2025 either eclipses or approximates what New York City will spend on core public services such as sanitation and the fire department.”
- Organ transplants: “While most organs are delivered successfully, some organs are delayed in transit, lose viability, and have to be thrown away. Some just get lost, too.”
- What’s wrong with the IRA bill: “Electricity prices have skyrocketed by 30% since 2021, rising 13 times faster than in the previous seven years. Meanwhile, gas prices have more than doubled since Biden took office. Rising energy costs have also been a major driver of food inflation, forcing Americans to spend over 11% of their disposable income on food—the highest percentage in three decades.” (Recommended)
- More than four years since the advent of Covid, public authorities keep pushing health practices contrary to medical and scientific knowledge.
- Goldman Sachs estimates that taxpayers will shell out a staggering $1.2 trillion—over three times the initial prediction—to fund the IRA’s green energy subsidies.
- Biden exaggerates the benefit of price negotiations for 10 drugs: “overall numbers tied to the amount Medicare actually pays for drugs that show discounts of roughly 22% on the 10 drugs collectively, compared to what the program paid last year. That’s more modest than the exaggerated discounts based on list prices that show price reductions of up to 79%.” And patients only pay a small fraction of the 22%. (STAT: gated)
- Charles River Laboratories, a top research contractor that helps drug makers with clinical trials, warns that pharmaceutical companies are slashing research and development owing to the IRA’s drug price controls. (WSJ)
Category: Policy & Legislation
Who is Better at Negotiating Drug Prices?
Yesterday morning the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the so-called Maximum Fair Prices (MFP) for the first 10 drugs to enter the “negotiation” regime under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Friday Links
- Study: Loneliness epidemic is an overblown myth.
- Study: Even light drinking can be harmful to older adults.
- Counter study: moderate drinking is good for the brain.
- Neil Gorsuch: U.S. statutory law runs to 60,000 pages, with another 188,000 pages of regulations, which delineate 300,000 criminal sanctions, while imposing on the American people 9.8 billion man-hours of paperwork each year. (WSJ)
- Against unions, part I
- How the Chevron decision might affect heath care.
Saturday Links
- Large randomized controlled trial (RCT) backs up traditional economic theory of minimum wage laws: fewer people are hired and there are fewer hours worked.
- RTC for guaranteed basic income: recipients worked less — household income decreased by 20 cents for every dollar they received.
- RCT providing $1,000 a month to homeless people: reduction in homelessness was not much different from the control group.
- Best explanation I have seen for why Imane Khelif of Algeria should not have been in women’s Olympic boxing.
- AAF pans the FTC report on PBMs.
- The new ability to conduct surgeries remotely with robots could be a boon to patients who live in under-doctored areas.