- “While life expectancies around the world have generally been rising, Russia’s life expectancies have not risen for about a half-century.”
- Do higher fertility rates produce higher economic growth?
- AAF: “We know tariffs on pharmaceuticals are bad.”
- Trump think tank: tariffs can lower drug prices.
- Covid study: vaccinated 6x more likely to be hospitalized than unvaxxed.
- ChatGPT’s o3 scores 136 on the Norway Mensa IQ test.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Saturday Links – 19 April 2025
- The case against most favored nation drug pricing.
- Study: “Our findings reveal that large minimum wage increases in the 2010s reduced employment among people with severe disabilities.”
- RFK, Jr: rise in autism rates are due to” environmental toxins,” in food and medicine and not “artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition, or changing diagnostic criteria.”
- Speculation on why there has been an increase in ADHD diagnoses.
- Traditional Medicare’s expenditures for remote physiological monitoring medicine have increased, from $6.8 million in 2019 to $194.5 million in 2023.
- The Trump plan for lower drug prices.
- The case for ivermectin.
Do Regulations Make Daycare Safer or Just Less Affordable?
Every daycare death is a tragedy, but they are relatively rare. The study is dated, but from 1985 to 2003 about 1,000 children died during daycare arrangements. That is about one a week, out of a population of 10 million. A back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests that is a yearly probability of death of about 1-in-200,000.
Friday Links
- The four minute mile effect.
- Do CT scans cause cancer?
- Trump: why do small molecule drugs get fewer years before they’re subject to pricing negotiations with Medicare, compared to biologics? (StatNews)
- “The total amount of microbial cells in the marine sediment subsurface is estimated to be 2.9 x 10 [to the 29th] cells. This is about 10,000 times more than the estimated number of stars in the universe.”
- After the Trump tax cuts the share of total taxes paid by the top 1% went up.