If more people began to act like consumers instead of passive patients, more health care providers would begin to compete for their business. For that matter, if more health care providers made it easier to shop for medical care, perhaps more patients would compare prices.
Category: Policy & Legislation
Thursday Links – August 2026
- Paragon: Nearly half of Medicaid expansion enrollees likely do not meet eligibility requirements.
- Why matching funds for Medicaid is a bad idea.
- Why baseball arbitration is different from doctor-insurer arbitration.
- The downside of gain of function research: “A single smallpox virion weighs less than 10⁻¹⁴ grams … if you were unlucky enough to inhale even a few dozen virions and had not been vaccinated, you would probably be infected; absent treatment, you face a case fatality rate of around 30.”
- “Race communism.” It’s the best thing I have read on racial politics.
Chronic Illness
Three-quarters of Americans have a chronic disease, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. More than half of Americans have two or more chronic conditions. Most death and disability in the US stem from these conditions. Ninety percent of the nation’s nearly $5 trillion in annual health expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions.
Just as importantly, most chronic conditions are preventable. So, Kennedy and Trump were right to prioritize chronic disease.
Source: From an anti-Kennedy opinion piece in Health Affairs.
What Trump didn’t say about election interference
After six years of asserting the 2020 presidential election was stolen and repeatedly claiming he would produce the evidence, President Trump gave it his best shot Thursday night. It didn’t go well. His speech was universally panned for regurgitating what we already knew and not providing any proof of election interference.
But the worst part is the U.S. intelligence he so frequently mentioned largely disagrees with him. Here’s what Trump didn’t say.