There is a growing mental health crisis today. Numerous people report being depressed or anxious due to Covid and its aftermath. As the Texas mall shooting illustrates there is a lot of untreated mental illness in the United States. Indeed visits to the emergency rooms (ER) for mental health problems are on the rise. A mental health issue such as a panic attack can mimic other problems. I met a cab driver who said he went to the ER for a heart attack but it turned out to be a panic attack. Purportedly, hundreds of thousands of Medicaid patients seek treatment in emergency rooms for mental health.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Friday Links
- What a hospital in the home is like at Mayo. Note: this is only possible because of Covid relaxation of normal Medicare and Medicaid rules.
- A proposal for value-based drug pricing. I am skeptical
- AI is learning how to read your mind. MRI scans reveal unexpressed thoughts.
- Private industry developed a nonaddictive painkiller. The FDA is why it isn’t widely available. (WSJ)
Friday Links
- 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)
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!