Warning: This post is déjà vu all over again. Hospitals are growing. There used to be hospitals in every town. Now there are two or three major health care systems that dominate every region. As hospitals grow bigger in size so do their prices. The Wall Street Journal summed this phenomenon saying, “As Hospitals Grow, So Does Your Bill.”
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Saturday Links
- Fauci testimony: He engaged in misleading wordplay and evasive blame-shifting.
- The Trump tax cuts (2017 TCJA) were actually very progressive.
- There have been more than 3 million excess deaths across the US, Europe and Australia since 2020. Could Covid vaccines be a guilty party?
- Why the IRA bill is especially bad for future cancer patients.
- David Boaz, RIP
- Kaiser has produced health policy 101.
- As of April, 5.3% of U.S. adults — 13.7 million people — had long Covid.
Study: Alzheimer’s Takes a Financial Toll Years Before Diagnosis
About 6.7 million senior Americans are living with Alzheimer’s dementia in the United States. This number is expected to double in the next 35 years. The cost of Medicare, hospice care and Medicaid long term care reached $345 billion in 2023, while the cost of unpaid caregiving was even higher. These costs will continue grow and tax the resources of both patients and those providing care.
Thursday Links
- “We find that a ten percent increase in the proportion of county residents with access to broadband internet leads to a 1.01 percent reduction in the number of suicides in a county, as well as improvements in self-reported mental and physical health.”
- Does our personality determine our political ideology? (HT: Tyler)
- Linus Pauling was wrong about vitamin C. But he was less wrong than some other bad nutritional advice.
- Why brain dead people may not actually be dead.
- While physician costs for overhead, medical equipment and supplies, as well as administrative staff, have soared, inflation-adjusted Medicare payments to physicians have dropped by over 25 percent over the past two decades. Commentary.
- “The Office of the Inspector General found that Medicare and Medicaid spent over $18 billion in three years on drugs with accelerated approval but incomplete confirmatory clinical trials.”