Around 76 million Baby Boomers have reached retirement age. All along life’s journey, whenever Baby Boomers have encountered a new phase of life, they stressed institutions, forcing them to expand to accommodate the biggest American cohort in history. Many seniors will enter retirement, lacking the resources they should have saved over a lifetime. Some will retire early at age 62.5, lowering their Social Security monthly income. Many retired after job losses. Then there is senior housing. All will need somewhere to live.
Category: Public Insurance
Friday Links – 3 July 2026
- The average silver plan deductible this year is $5,304.
- Doctors can change the color of your eyes. (Cost: $12,000)
- Less developed countries can ignore patent law, reverse engineer patented drugs and make them available – even to visitors from developed countries. (NYT)
- Chemotherapy drugs in short supply are being rationed.
- The “Fiscal Democracy Index” measures the share of revenues remaining after accounting for the mandatory spending and interest costs imposed by past Congresses. In the early to mid-1960s, the index stood at over 60 percent. Today, the index has fallen to zero.
Wednesday Links – 1 July 2026
- In March … a surgical assistant in Dallas earned $50,456 through arbitration for a prostate removal operation. The surgeon, who accepted the patient’s insurance, earned $1,843. (NYT)
- “The surgery done 700,000 times per year is no better than a placebo surgery.”
- Drug economics: the marginal cost of one more pill is almost zero; but the marginal cost of treatments based on the sequencing of your individual genome can be quite high.
- “The general pattern … research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks.” (The Atlantic)
- This hospital has opted out of Medicare, charges market prices in its ER and turns patients away if they can’t pay. (Statnews)
Health Insurance Affects Hospital Length of Stay
When I worked at an urban hospital many years ago, we had a saying for the people who presented to the emergency room with violent injuries. We called them the “knife and gun club.” They represented people whose lifestyle was more dangerous than yours or mine. They rarely had health insurance and created sizable uncollectable debts. A Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health News analysis found that one-quarter of gunshot victims were uninsured, at least in Florida. Furthermore, uninsured gunshot victims have hospital stays that were shorter than those covered by some type of health insurance.