- Antos: Against Medicare coverage for hearing aids.
- 58% of Payers Use Outcomes-Based Contracts for Prescription Drugs
- In the US, 85-90% of people who have sudden cardiac arrests do not survive. A home defibrillator cost $1,000. (NYT)
- Michael Milken: “We can now reasonably speculate about therapies that will give us the ability to clean tiny cancers from our bodies as routinely as dentists clean our teeth.”
- How Medicaid regulates drug prices.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Withdrawal Pains: Covid Welfare State is Disbanding
In the early, panicked days of the pandemic, the United States government did something that was previously unimaginable. It transformed itself, within weeks, into something akin to a European-style welfare state.
Bacteriophages Are Supercharged Antibiotics: Why Aren’t They Available?
Bacteriophages are viruses that kill bacteria. Phages are common, found in every nook and cranny of the natural world. There are likely trillions of them. They were first used over a century ago but remain largely unknown. A French microbiologist used them to treat dysentery in children just after World War I. They have been used extensively in Eastern Europe but not in the West.
Update on the British NHS
All is not well:
- The waiting list for hospital-based procedures stands at 7.2 million—about 12 percent of the population
- In mid-2022, 42.7 percent of all patients were forced to wait more than four hours before they received any care.
- Compared to 2019, outpatient appointments are down 13.8 percent.
- Official measures of mortality indicate that the NHS’s shortcomings are contributing to higher-than-normal death rates, with perhaps as many as 500 “excess” deaths occurring every week.