- Should vending machines be available to dispense medication for opioid overdoses?
- Why are people having less sex?
- Study: Native Americans, once among the tallest people in the world, lost their height advantage after the demise of the bison.
- How university research → startup companies → commercial innovation led to the Moderna Covid vaccine.
- How colleges and students scam the student loan program and why Biden’s new executive order will make things much worse.
- Euthanasia is the sixth leading cause of death in Canada.
Category: Direct Primary Care
Stat News: Medicare’s Bundled Payment Initiative for Joint Replacement a Rigged Game
The price Medicare pays for joint replacement had hardy changed in two decades when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began an experimental program to pay bundled payments for a full 90-day episode of care. The program was designed to save Medicare money while rewarding surgeons who keep costs down and penalizing those whose costs are higher.
Surgeons whose patients cost Medicare less than the lump sum over 90 days get a portion of their savings as a reward. Surgeons who don’t save Medicare money face penalties large enough to bankrupt them.
Are Eyeglasses Held Hostage to Enrich Optometrists?
About the time I reached 40-years of age many of my peers began having trouble with their arms being too short or the print on newspapers being too small. Often it was both. I didn’t have the same problem but about 10 years ago I realized I couldn’t read highway signs that were blocks ahead. I went to an optometrist for an eye exam and he wrote me a prescription for eyeglasses. In the past 10 years I’ve seen an optometrist four times and each time the prescription had not changed.
Here’s the deal. If I break a pair of glasses that worked perfectly and it’s been more than a year since my eye exam, I am required to get an eye exam in order to replace my glasses. This happened to me once when my glasses fell between my car seat and broke when I adjusted the seat. Although my optometrist told me he didn’t expect my vision would change for 10 years, the law still requires me to have a valid prescription even if I’m only needing an extra pair of glasses. It varies by state. Some states allow prescriptions to be valid for longer than a year.
Mosquitoes Have a Plethora of Ways to Hunt Humans
An article in The Atlantic delivers some bad news. The damage done by mosquitoes is immense and they’re not easy to stop.
The insects’ infatuation with us is costly: By way of the many, many deadly pathogens they carry, mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal on Earth does (except, well, us).
It turns out that mosquitoes are complex creatures that track us in numerous ways.