- A reminder: The Cuban health care system is far from the best in the world and nothing about it warrants extraordinary praise.
- “In the past few weeks, there’s been an explosion of new tools for programming DNA and RNA.”
- “We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology.”
- “Once groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines became available a year into the pandemic, rich countries looked out for themselves and poorer countries were largely left behind.”
- AI can handle customer calls better than humans.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Going broke
The [Penn Warton Budget Model (PWBM)] brief also outlines the effects of real interest rate increases on future debt projections. In the base case, the authors project federal debt rising from 98 percent of GDP in 2023 to 189 percent in 2050. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecast shows debt reaching 169 percent of GDP that same year. If the real average interest rate for U.S. borrowing rises by 50 basis points above the PWBM forecast of 2.3 percent, then federal debt would climb to 208 percent of GDP in 2050.
Wednesday Links
- Claim: Sociopaths are not all bad. HT: Tyler
- Leap year explained.
- How the Paragon Health Institute proposes to reform Medicare Advantage.
- How the Alliance of Community Health Plans proposes to reform Medicare Advantage. Some of the recommendations are very similar.
- About 86 million U.S. adults age 20 or older have total cholesterol levels. Almost half of U.S. adults (45.5%) who could benefit from cholesterol medicine are not taking it.
Long-Term Medical-Assisted Opioid Treatment Works, but is Underutilized
Last week I wrote that more than 100,000 Americans die every year from drug overdoses in the United States. In the 12-month period ended in September 2023, 111,380 Americans had died. As recently as 2015 the number of Americans overdosing was less than half of recent figure.
Opioids, specifically fentanyl, are most often the cause of overdose deaths. The RAND Corporation released a study that found that 42% of American adults personally know someone who died by overdose. Furthermore, of those four-in-ten adults who know someone who died of an overdose the average number of people they know who died is two.