- Good news: The FCC is cracking down on robocalls.
- The case for Novavax.
- Lancet study: rising global temperatures since 2000 have caused 116,000 more heat deaths annually, but also led to 283,000 fewer cold deaths.
- The doctor doesn’t know best: health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers are switching mental health patients from a prescribed medication to one that may not work as well.
- How well does Paxlovid really work?
- Why is America’s mortality rate higher than that of other nations? Study considers every possibility except the obvious one: our population is heterogeneous. Last time I looked, Americans of northern European descent have the same life expectancy as northern Europeans.
Category: Direct Primary Care
New Antibiotics Are Desperately Needed: Why Drug Makers Won’t Develop Them
Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections are a growing. Worse yet, the pipeline of new antibiotic drugs in development are few and far between. It’s been several years since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new antibiotic. The FDA recently declined to approve two new applications for drugs to treat urinary tract infections (sulopenem and tebipenem). The agency wants more data on the efficacy compared to drugs currently on the market. It’s not likely to get better anytime soon.
Monday Links
- 7 Monkeypox questions answered. It doesn’t look good for sexually active gay men, and vaccine production is at a trickle.
- California is going to make its own insulin.
- Mini “Build Back Better” bill to cost $1 trillion. “It’s better than nothing,” said one progressive.
- Study: giving people money doesn’t make them better off. “The data are most consistent with the notion that receiving some but not enough money made participants’ needs—and the gap between their resources and needs—more salient, which in turn generated feelings of distress.”
- Biden’s Executive Order on Abortion: “Nothing in his executive order will fundamentally change the everyday lives of poor women in a red state,” Georgetown University health law professor Lawrence Gostin told Vox.
- David Henderson: Abortion in Canada is rationed by waiting.
What Difference Does Health Care Make?
Robin Hanson’s classic article comes to this conclusion:
Perhaps the most striking puzzle in health policy is the apparent lack of an aggregate empirical relation between medical care and health. Observed variations in medical care typically have an insignificant effect on average population health, even when looking at large data sets, sets larger than those which convinced most researchers of the reality of many other influences on health.