- Can medical expenses be crowdfunded?
- Study of treatment facilities for adolescents with opioid use disorder: nearly 40 percent had no beds immediately available or offered a waitlist, with a mean wait time of 28.4 days. Only 57 percent accepted Medicaid. We are becoming more like Canada every day.
- David Frieman on historical “facts” you have probably heard about (and even seen depicted in movies) that are actually myths. Fun reading.
- The Geothermal energy solution: “There’s 41 times more heat energy in the earth’s crust than that of all known petroleum and nuclear fuel reserves. What’s more, the energy of that sun beneath our feet is carbon-free and potentially available all day, every day.”
- More on abolishing the FDA.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Congress Needs to Ensure Health Care Price Transparency is not a Sham
The latest issue of Health Care News features a commentary, “Price Transparency Is a Fraud in a Fake Market.” This argument is somewhat surprising because conservative policy wonks love to expound on the benefits of price transparency. The logic goes that if only doctors, hospitals and drug makers were forced to reveal prices consumers would shop and force down prices, like occurs in competitive markets.
Wednesday Links
- A bipartisan congressional tax deal sounds very good to us.
- “Having a best friend with a reported serious injury in the previous year increases the probability of own opioid misuse by around 7 percentage points in a population where 17 percent ever misuses opioids.”
- Between 2000 and 2020, Black individuals consistently experienced higher cancer mortality than White individuals for all cancers except female lung and bronchus.
- “Over time, most Latin American countries can expect shrinking populations,” causing lots of economic problems. Recommended
- Why Florida may not save $180 million by importing drugs from Canada. (Bloomberg)
Tuesday Links
- MLK fact of the day: black men are more likely to graduate from college than go to prison. In 2009, it was the other way around.
- Workers at 22 federal agencies plan a walk out today to protest Biden’s policies affecting Gaza.
- Last year Congress failed to reauthorize key parts of “the single-most impactful US government program ever, saving 25 million lives over the past 20 years.”
- FAA (which regulates the airlines) has a DEI policy that emphasizes recruiting and hiring people with targeted disabilities, including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
- The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine segregates and separates its first-year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin. (WSJ)
- “Gas station heroin” peddled at convenience stores. (NYT)