In an 82-page report, the surgeon general’s staff outlined the scope of the problem. This is a curious phenomenon because the Information Age makes connecting with people easier than ever. Prior to modern communication technology, people were really isolated, often working on farms with no daily interactions other than close family members.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Thursday Links
- The first human implanted with a chip from Elon Musk’s computer-brain interface company can move a computer mouse with thought alone.
- A completely false headline: Banning surprise medical bills is raising costs elsewhere. (STAT: gated) It’s saving patients money and causing insurers to pay a bit more. What else would you expect????
- Shkreli Awards (for 2023) have arrived. My favorite: the CEO of the nation’s largest nonprofit hospital chain gets a salary of $35 million.
- More evidence in favor of the Mediterranean diet.
- Families USA (which traditionally has advocated socialism in health care) has a quasi-capitalist plan for health care reform.
- After all these years, Matthew Holt still can’t figure out how to reduce health care costs. (Hint: look at how costs are reduced in every other market.)
Obamacare’s Three Key Failings
- Obamacare worsened the quality of individual market health insurance and caused millions of people to replace better coverage with worse coverage. Obamacare substantially raised premiums and deductibles and most plans exclude top hospitals and doctors.
- The rising costs from Obamacare led more small businesses to drop health insurance.
- The law’s coverage expansion now costs taxpayers more than $200 billion a year — almost all of which are subsidies to health insurers — without improving health outcomes.
Source: Brian Blase
The Cost of Price Controls on Drugs
We conservatively find that the IRA’s policy to set prices at 9 years after market entry for select small molecule drugs will reduce their expected revenues in the U.S. market by 8.0%, which implies a reduction in R&D investment of almost 12.3%, or $232.1 billion over 20 years. Over the same time frame, we conclude that there will be 188 fewer small molecule treatments, including 79 fewer new small molecule drugs and 109 fewer post-approval indications for these drugs. We find that this forgone innovation is expected to lead to 116.0 million life years lost due to the missed opportunities to improve health.