- When a key employee leaves: OpenAI is in open chaos.
- More on Sam Altman: he believed his company’s products could kill us all.
- Social Security’s Widows Scam: Some 13,000 widows have been effectively defrauded out of over $130 million dollars.
- 59 percent of Americans say money can buy happiness. How much money? Around $1.2 million.
- Why choice of a doctor matters: Between the top and bottom quartiles of spending, 79% of the difference is due to utilization and 19% is due to a difference in prices.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
What Is a Drug? Philosopher Struggles but the FDA Has its Own Definition
Drugs are the most efficient of all medical therapies, representing only about 8.8% of national health expenditures. By contrast, at $864.6 billion in 2021, Americans spent more than twice as much on physician care and 3.5 times as much on hospital care. Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs are especially economical, most of which were once prescription drugs. OTC drugs represent between 1% and 2% of medical spending.
Friday Links
- How wasteful is traditional Medicare? Every dollar Medicare spent on monitoring spending generated $24–$29 in government savings.
- Drug approval times around the world.
- The new Ai Pin sounds intriguing. But what will it do for health care?
- Who needs a doctor’s office, if you can get care from a kiosk in a shopping mall?
Thursday Links
- California charges taxpayers twice as much as Florida and delivers worse services.
- The true cost of charging an EV is equivalent to $17.33-per-gallon gasoline — but the EV owner pays less than 7% of that.
- Alvin Hanson: “world population will soon fall fast, and then unless we achieve full AGI or end aging by then, our total world economic capacity will also fall, with scale economies and innovation rates both falling roughly in proportion.”
- How to avoid high drug costs for patients: Let government buy the patents and put them in the public domain.
- Only 1 percent of Americans are both uninsured and lack A opportunity to enroll in subsidized coverage. This entire Health Affairs piece by Brian Blase is recommended.