- 7 Monkeypox questions answered. It doesn’t look good for sexually active gay men, and vaccine production is at a trickle.
- California is going to make its own insulin.
- Mini “Build Back Better” bill to cost $1 trillion. “It’s better than nothing,” said one progressive.
- Study: giving people money doesn’t make them better off. “The data are most consistent with the notion that receiving some but not enough money made participants’ needs—and the gap between their resources and needs—more salient, which in turn generated feelings of distress.”
- Biden’s Executive Order on Abortion: “Nothing in his executive order will fundamentally change the everyday lives of poor women in a red state,” Georgetown University health law professor Lawrence Gostin told Vox.
- David Henderson: Abortion in Canada is rationed by waiting.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Friday Links
- Scott Sumner on the FDA’s reversal – allowing pharmacists to prescribe the Pfizer Covid vaccine: Is 350 people dying every day the reason the government finally saw the light?
- A pocket-sized, smartphone-directed ultrasound could become as “ubiquitous as the stethoscope.”
- Are we in danger of losing control of Monkeypox?
- During the US Open, airplanes were diverted from the match’s airspace and flew over other neighborhoods. The result: more insomnia, more cardiovascular disease, and more substance abuse and mental health emergencies. But great tennis!
- Covid hasn’t gone away: There were many more new COVID infections in the past week in the US than in the corresponding week 1 year ago and 2 years ago.
- Telemedicine surged during the pandemic:
Weekly telemedicine visits for one insurer increased from a mean of 773 in 2020 prior to stay-at-home orders to 45,632 in subsequent weeks. Patients who were older, had existing chronic conditions, were male, or resided in predominantly non-Hispanic Black or African American Census tracts showed increased telemedicine utilization in later weeks of the pandemic.
Big Pharma Blames Hospitals and PBMs for High Drug Prices
Adam Fein at Drug Channels pointed me to a June 2022 report from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) on the price of drugs. The report is full of tidbits on drug spending. For example, the report states that prescription drug spending represents only 14% of health care expenditures. It is true that drugs are the best value in health care (especially over-the-counter drugs but that was not in the report). While it is true that drugs tend to be a better value than, say hospitals, not all drugs are of equal value. (That too was not in the report.)
Thursday Links
- Shared Uber rides are back. But is anyone using them?
- Medical debt actually fell during the pandemic – across all income groups.
- Medicare Advantage plans cost $1,704 less per member, per year, relative to traditional Medicare.
- Paying employees $1,000 each to get vaccinated induces 98% compliance.
- Did Covid cause an increase in prejudice against East Asians and Hispanics?