- New Zealand adopts affirmative action for its medical waiting lists.
- Governments around the world have spent $1.34 trillion to fight climate change.
- Is virtual care the answer for Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure in seniors?
- It’s a cocktail after cocktails: an IV drip for hangovers. (NYT)
- Hot dog eating contests: scientists have determined that the human body is capable of eating — at most — 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
- Drinking alcohol before or after intense exercise isn’t advised. (NYT)
- Mark Cuban Cost Pus Drugs to sell biosimilars ($569 v. $6,922 for Yusimry)
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Thursday Links
- Judge’s free speech ruling was prompted by Fauci’s attempt to silence lockdown critics.
- Outgoing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warns we should beware of politicized science and misinformation. But, no mea culpa?
- A quarter of all Americans have not yet been infected by Covid.
- AI in health: Who gets paid? Who gets sued? AI has already been used in diagnosing dementia, heart attacks, lung cancer, and pancreatic cancer.
- Prof. Kotlikoff explains the difference between the economist’s approach to personal financial planning and the conventional approach.
- Casey Mulligan study: Biden regulations are costing $10,000 per US household.
Should You Brownbag Your Own Hospital Drugs?
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)
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)