- Kamal Harris’ health plan: Medicare for all, with private insurers participating – like Medicare Advantage.
- Surprise: low voter turnout benefits Democrats, not Republicans. “The likeliest voters are Democrats, while the ones who are less likely to vote are Republicans.”
- Message to the White House: inflation isn’t caused by greed. (WaPo)
- Estimating the cost of our bureaucratic health insurance payment system.
- What happens when you give people $1,000 a month with no string attached? They spend it. They also work less. “For every $1 of free money received, participants’ earnings dropped by at least 12 cents and total household income fell by at least 21 cents.”
Category: Public Insurance
Saturday Links
- The number of active drug shortages in the U.S. is 300, down from an all-time high of 323. But nothing to cheer about.
- Microsoft global outage forces health systems to cancel appointments, delay procedures.
- Everything to know about the theory of language.
- OpenAI’s GPT-4o scored 98 percent on some of the most challenging parts of the US Medical Licensing Examination.
- Happiness seems to increase with the log of absolute income, so going from $50k to $100k has a much larger impact than going from $250k to $300k.
- How the Biden administration interprets “march-in” rights: New guidance explicitly states that the government could march in and seize the patents underlying any product officials think is overpriced, in fields from AI to aeronautics. Recommended.
This Doesn’t Seem to be a Problem in Medicare Advantage
According to a recent report in the Washington Post, a $3 billion scam involving urinary catheters has brought to light serious flaws in Medicare, prompting strong calls for reform….
We Are Becoming More Like Canada Every Day
A study of a group of community health clinics in the OCHIN Network found that only 43% of patient specialty care referrals were successfully completed between October 2022 and September 2023. This means patients did not receive necessary follow-up care more than 57% of the time. Even when patients booked a referral appointment, they were forced to wait an average of 73 days for access to a gastroenterologist, 62 days for a cardiologist, and 54 days for a behavioral health specialist.