Consider the CDC studies on school mask mandates, which have uniformly claimed benefits. Two researchers at the University of Toronto and University of California, Davis recently sought to replicate a CDC study that found that pediatric Covid cases increased faster in U.S. counties that didn’t have school mask mandates compared with those that did….
As another example, recall the CDC’s widely cited studies last fall that purportedly found vaccines provide better protection than natural immunity from infection…. But a new study, published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that natural immunity provides more-durable and stronger protection than vaccines.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Health Plans Now Required to Post Prices. Will it Help?
An article in Kaiser Health News explained that health plans are now required to post the prices they have negotiated with all in-network health care providers. Failing to do so will result in substantial fines. The new rule is the result of an executive order then President Trump issued back in 2019.
Price transparency is the holy grail in health policy. There is not one price, but many prices depending on who the payer is. There is the list price that nobody pays unless uninsured and caught off-guard. There’s the cash price paid after receiving care. It is often same as the list price. Then there is the (lower) negotiated cash price if uninsured and paid in advance of receiving care. Then there are the prices Medicare pays and Medicaid pays. Health insurers may all have different prices for the same procedures. Indeed, prices vary tremendously across facilities. A knee replacement may be $30,000 at one hospital and $130,000 at another.
Friday Links
- Healthier is wealthier: “We find that the intervention [to prevent heart disease] significantly increased earnings by 3 percent and family income by 4 percent with no concurrent effect on labor force participation.”
- Can Public Choice explain why health care has been relatively unaffected by inflation? Speculative.
- Your health data might be for sale.
- After learning that McKinsey urged Purdue to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin (widely blamed for the opioid crisis), we now learn that it has been urging Endo to aggressively market a painkiller that is twice as potent.
- NY Health Department advises users to consume fentanyl “safely.”
Pfizer’s View of its Own Vaccine
Turns out, it is very positive. But in a review of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s book, Moonshot, Robert Kaplan asks:
How transparent has Pfizer been? In the book’s more than 200 pages, one topic is not explored in any real depth—side effects. Although the vaccine is generally regarded as safe, side effects do appear to be more common—and perhaps more severe—than for other widely used vaccines. In the 2020 clinical trial that provided the basis for FDA emergency-use authorization, more than 83% of 18- to 55-year-old participants (in comparison with 14% of those injected with a placebo) reported arm pain after their first shot, and approximately a third had a fever in reaction to their second (in contrast to less than 1% for a placebo).