- From the Committee to Unleash Prosperity: “Why is the U.S. government spending $1.7 billion purchasing 20 million covid vaccine doses for kids?” and “Gavin Newsom Admits He Was Wrong, Wrong, Wrong on COVID Lockdowns.”
- A scholarly argument for e-cigs.
- CTUP Question: How can Washington spend $1.2 trillion ($9,000 per American household) on anti-poverty programs and yet still have nearly 40 million people in poverty?
- Opioid update: The 300 counties that received the most doses of prescription pain pills from 2006 to 2013 later had the highest death rate from illicit opioids.
- Peter Coy reviews the Cato book, “Superabundance.”
- US per capita income growth rate for the past 150 years: remarkably steady at 2%.
- Nearly half of adults under 30 do not have a primary care doctor.
Category: Direct Primary Care
Why Two Parents Matter
- Families headed by single mothers are five times as likely to live in poverty as married-couple families.
- Children in single-mother homes are less likely to graduate from high school or earn a college degree. They are more likely to become single parents themselves, perpetuating the cycle.
- Almost 30 percent of American children now live with a single parent or with no parent at all. Single parenting is less common in white and Asian households, but only 38 percent of Black children live with married parents.
Dr. ChatGPT Outperforms Dr. Google
Have you ever consulted Dr. Google? When I first began researching Internet-based medicine 25 years ago everyone was amazed that something like 100 million people per year were searching the Internet for health information. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Internet to learn more about one’s own health conditions. In the early days doctors hated it. Articles appeared in medical journals lamenting all the misinformation patients would encounter and the waste of doctors’ time discussing or refuting what their patients found. Looking back these fears seem ludicrous. Respected health care systems, like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, sponsor websites that provide basic but useful information about health and medicine.
Why It’s So Hard to Find a Primary Care Physician
Years ago I had a great primary care physician. One day I drove to his office and saw him assisting an elderly man walk to his car. Dr. Ingram could have asked his nurse to assist the patient. He could even have ignored the frail patient’s unsteady gait and let him fend for himself. Yet, Dr. Ingram personally helped his elderly patient make it to his car. That impressed me immensely. Not only did he treat the man’s health complaint, he made sure his patient got safely out of the office and on his way home. Nobody paid him for that, he did it out of his desire to help people.