Drugs are the most efficient of all medical therapies, representing only about 8.8% of national health expenditures. By contrast, at $864.6 billion in 2021, Americans spent more than twice as much on physician care and 3.5 times as much on hospital care. Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs are especially economical, most of which were once prescription drugs. OTC drugs represent between 1% and 2% of medical spending.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Friday Links
- How wasteful is traditional Medicare? Every dollar Medicare spent on monitoring spending generated $24–$29 in government savings.
- Drug approval times around the world.
- The new Ai Pin sounds intriguing. But what will it do for health care?
- Who needs a doctor’s office, if you can get care from a kiosk in a shopping mall?
Thursday Links
- California charges taxpayers twice as much as Florida and delivers worse services.
- The true cost of charging an EV is equivalent to $17.33-per-gallon gasoline — but the EV owner pays less than 7% of that.
- Alvin Hanson: “world population will soon fall fast, and then unless we achieve full AGI or end aging by then, our total world economic capacity will also fall, with scale economies and innovation rates both falling roughly in proportion.”
- How to avoid high drug costs for patients: Let government buy the patents and put them in the public domain.
- Only 1 percent of Americans are both uninsured and lack A opportunity to enroll in subsidized coverage. This entire Health Affairs piece by Brian Blase is recommended.
Monday Links
- Are apprenticeships a viable alternative to higher education? If so, why does government subsidize the latter and not the former?
- The IRA bill has already stopped the development of one cancer drug and may be delaying many more.
- Why do new drugs have such bizarre names? It’s bureaucracy gone amok.
- Study: thunderstorms cause asthma attacks.