- Could redistribution of income make people healthier? Evidence that the answer is “yes.”
- 330 COVID-19 articles in science journals have been retracted.
- NYC to help patients compare hospital costs. (NYT)
- More from Graboyes on sterilization.
- Steve Moore to Congress: ESG is harmful to retirees.
- Merck sues over IRA drug price negotiation: It’s an unconstitutional “taking” and it also “compels speech.”
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Thursday Links
- AEI: Return the savings from site neutral payments to the hospitals. It’s called taking from the rich and then giving back to the rich.
- Where are we on the status of (legally) importing drugs from Canada? We’re getting close.
- Update on hospital price transparency: “The widescale noncompliance of 75.5% of hospitals is due to most hospitals’ files being incomplete, illegible, or not having prices clearly associated with both payer and plan.”
- A new model for cell and gene therapies: Medicaid pays only if they work.
- AI Quote of the week:
So far I have explained why four of the five most often proposed risks of AI are not actually real – AI will not come to life and kill us, AI will not ruin our society, AI will not cause mass unemployment, and AI will not cause an ruinous increase in inequality. But now let’s address the fifth, the one I actually agree with: AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things.
Why Don’t Some Promising Drugs Come to Market?
Earlier this year I wrote about bacteriophages, naturally-occurring antibiotics that are not widely available. Phases, as they’re called, are viruses found in nature that kill bacteria. Each is highly specific, killing only one kind of bacteria. That is (possibly) why pharmaceutical companies haven’t shown a lot of interest in developing them as antibiotic drug therapies. Drug companies would need to develop a different bacteriophage therapy for each pathogen targeted. Although mostly ignored by Western drug companies, phages were common in former Soviet-bloc countries. The following is an article about a rare, drug-resistant bacteria that affected Gulf War soldiers treatable only by phages.
Monday Links
- Why the new food stamp work requirements matter.
- Republicans have been as bad as Democrat’s when it comes to federal regulations.
- How much do you like your job? 9 of 10 workers would give up a quarter of their lifetime earnings to do meaningful work. (WSJ)
- Johns Hopkins study: less than 10% of Texas hospitals ever sued a patient for an unpaid bill. Even in those cases, the hospitals’ recovery was scanty and half the time the patients didn’t even show up at the hearing.
- But here is an exception: A rich nonprofit hospital denies care to patients who don’t pay their bills. (NYT)
- Noah Smith: there is a need for libertarianism after all. HT: Tyler