- Health Savings Accounts after 30 years: 27.5 million individuals own one, with holdings of $105.7 billion.
- Three Medicaid reforms Biden doesn’t like: Trump era work requirements, the Tennessee block grant and the Texas waiver.
- What white bagging, brown bagging and clear bagging have to do with specialty drugs.
- A Crenshaw/Schrier House bill would give Medicaid enrollees access to direct primary care doctors.
- Insurers are using “copay accumulators” to prevent copay assistance (say, from a nonprofit to help patients with drugs costs) for counting toward the fulfillment of a deductible.
- The Biden administration is misusing the “march in rights” created under the Bayh-Dole Act to threaten to impose price controls on drugs that originally had government research funding. (WSJ)
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Thursday Links
- Why we need Association Health Plans for small businesses and gig workers: Less than one-third of small companies are even offering heath insurance to their employees.
- Why doctors so aggressively pushed the Covid vaccines.
- Sanders/Cassidy bill would speed genic drugs to the marketplace.
- Mattel is making a Barbie doll with Down syndrome: “It’s set to join existing dolls with behind-the-ear hearing aids, a wheelchair, alopecia and a prosthetic limb within the company’s heavily diversity and inclusion-focused line.”
- Against bringing back the Woolly mammoth.
- An early estimate of the cost of Covid from Harvard: $16 trillion!
Thursday Links
- The FDA approves some drugs other nations don’t want.
- Study: After St. George’s Hospital in The UK ended its mask mandate for staff and visitors for some, but not all, wards, there was no difference in Covid infections between the two settings.
- Meta analysis of 2,168 studies finds that wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic led to negative health consequences, including itching, headaches, and restriction of oxygen.
- Aaron Carroll: Contra the Cochrane mask study.
- A new wealth tax in Norway causes the rich to leave Norway.
- US compensates people injured by the Covid vaccine for the first time.
- Health care cost effectiveness: how much is a quality adjusted year of life worth?
- A type of jellyfish has achieved immortality.
Why We Need an FDA
I often criticize the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for being stodgy, slow to react and overly risk averse. However, the agency has an important purpose. The forerunner of the FDA dates back to the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. At the time unscrupulous food manufacturers would use red dye to make spoiled beef appear fresh and used formaldehyde as a preservative to make foods last longer. Only a few years prior, Heroin was considered a wonder drug, as a treatment for morphine addiction and as a cough suppressant. Morphine was also once used as an elixir for teething pain in babies.