Late last summer Pamela Ludwig, owner of a Franklin, Tennessee firm that goes by the name Pretty in Pink Boutique, began receiving calls from angry Medicare enrollees across the country. The seniors were mad that their Medicare accounts had been charged for urinary catheters they did not need, nor had received. About the same time 1,300 miles away in El Paso, Texas Erika Tavarez too began receiving angry emails and then a visit from the FBI. She had recently sold a durable medical equipment business, also called Pretty in Pink, that provided prothesis for breast cancer survivors.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Monday Links
- Steuerle on the marriage tax: marital penalties are marriage vow penalties easily avoided by those who don’t believe in the vows.
- Lookism: how you look may affect your outcome in courts of law. HT: Tyler
- Margaret Mead was an early LSD experimenter with CIA funding.
- A little appreciated fact about federal government finances: for the past 50 years federal revenues have averaged about 18% of GDP and have never reached 20% — despite many many changes in the tax code. Could this represent a “law” of public finance?
Does Society Hate Old People?
Kaiser Health News (now called KHN) published an article titled, “Do We Simply Not Care About Old People?” The inflammatory headline was about the high death toll of older adults from covid, saying:
The covid-19 pandemic would be a wake-up call for America, advocates for the elderly predicted: incontrovertible proof that the nation wasn’t doing enough to care for vulnerable older adults.
Saturday Links
- Deficit spending: Trump was bad, but Biden has been worse.
- Cause of inflation: Trump bears some blame, but again, Biden has been worse.
- “The Biden administration wants to throw a grenade into this carefully balanced ecosystem for research, development, and commercialization of a new medical technology.”
- We may be able to use CRISPR to treat rare inflammatory diseases.