- How Medicare Advantage works: “The plans look for unhealthy people who likely have been poorly served by the fee-for-service system. These people both have big payment multipliers attached to them and offer lots of opportunity for improving care and lowering costs.”
- How to reform the NIH.
- Covid lockdowns had almost no affect on the top students, but was devastating for those at the bottom.
- Cato’s suggestions for DOGE.
- The money donated to restore Notre Dame could instead have saved 47,500 lives from death by malaria – and maybe twice that number.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
A (Slightly) Sympathetic Look at Health Insurers
Insurers are blamed for strategies to avoid paying too much for health care, while the providers of health care don’t suffer as much hate. The reality is: we’re all guilty. We all have perverse incentives to overconsume, price gouge or refuse to pay. The goal of health reform should be to align all three party’s incentives to better work together.
Monday Links
- Direct primary care for Medicaid.
- Senators demand release of NIH study on transgender care.
- Preauthorization denials: they are twice as high in Medicaid as they are in Medicare Advantage.
- Study: hospital upcoding in 2019 (relative to 2011 coding practices) was associated with $14.6 billion in hospital payments, including $5.8 billion from private health plans, $4.6 billion from Medicare, and $1.8 billion from Medicaid.
- Relative to employer small-group plans, Marketplace plans paid 6.9% lower doctor fees, 13.3% lower hospital fees, and were 26.3% lower outpatient prices.
Saturday Links
- Has Trump’s election sparked more vasectomies?
- Why is the US growing faster than other countries, even though our students do worse on test scores?
- Walmart says it can now offer same day delivery (including pharmaceuticals) to 86% of all US households.
- Study: Substantial Medicare price reductions in the medical device industry over 20 years led to a 29% decline in new product introductions and an 80% decrease in patent filings.
- Are drug expiration dates meaningless?
- Some people on X are cheering the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s murder.