Everyone probably knows what brown bagging is. That’s when you pack a sandwich in a brown paper bag and take it to work rather than joining your spendthrift colleagues, when they go out for lunch or order takeout. Sometimes it saves you the time of going out to eat but mostly it saves you the expense of a meal prepared by a restaurant. A sandwich, an apple and a container of yogurt that costs you less than $2 to pack at home substitutes for a $12 takeout meal. In the hospital industry the practice of brown bagging is called white bagging. That is when your insurance company refuses to pay the hospital’s 600% markup for costly oncology drugs and has them delivered to the hospital for patients’ infusions (or patient picks them up at the specialty pharmacy)
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Monday Links
- 93% of cancer centers report a shortage of carboplatin and 70% report shortages for cisplatin.
- Up to 500,000 U.S. cancer patients could be at risk of having their treatment disrupted. (WSJ)
- WHO is about to declare that Aspartame, a common artificial sweetener, is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” The back and forth on this issue never seems to end.
- Expected lifetime out-of-pocket spending by Medicare enrollees: $157,500 (Fidelity) to $197,000 (Employee Benefit Research Institute). (NYT)
- A single year with a grossly ineffective teacher can cost a classroom of students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings. Yet it can take 10 years and $250,000 to $450,000 to fire a lousy California teacher, and fewer than 0.002% are dismissed for unprofessional conduct or poor performance. (WSJ)
Friday Links
- NPR: $142,938 in medical costs for a young camper’s snakebite.
- Robert Graboyes tells the rest of the story: the family paid none of the bill.
- CBO: Over the next 30 years, federal spending averages 25.7 percent of GDP while revenues average 18.4 percent of GDP.
- Green madness: You’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet.
- Drug shortages explained: Over time, price and margin erosion lead to essential medicines becoming low-margin commodities, and eventual production and supply issues create vulnerability to shortages and susceptibility to low reinvestment.
- Medicaid managed care explained: Enrollment in the lowest-spending plan reduces spending by at least 25 percent [but] rather than reducing “wasteful” spending, lower-spending plans broadly reduce medical service provision— including the provision of low-cost, high-value care—and worsen beneficiary satisfaction and health.
Monday Links
- New diabetic wonder drugs come from two ugly predators: Angler fish and Gila monsters. (NYT)
- Tyler Cowen on the lab leak. (Should we hope it’s true?)
- Casey Mulligan on the household burden of green policies: a poor household pays almost 9% of its income to pay for green policies whereas the rich pay 1.5%.
- Dr. Marty Makary: Ten reasons why we know Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab.
- AMA: BMI standards are racist.