Nearly three years ago I wrote about rural hospital lab scams. That’s when a shady marketing consultant working with scammers convinces struggling rural hospitals that they have a solution for precarious hospital finances. Basically, every lab test ordered by affiliated physicians is billed through a rural hospital with a more lucrative lab contract. The hospital makes money for doing nothing, while the marketing guys get a big, fat cut of the proceeds. You and I pay higher prices as a result.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Friday Links
Is your Covid vaccination status a private matter? Has the government been tracking people who are unvaccinated? 73% of U.S. adults who are unvaccinated say they would not get a shot with an updated Covid formula either. How the party bases are changing: In the recent mayor’s race, Chicago’s high-income, elite neighborhoods voted for more…
Thursday Links
- The FDA approves some drugs other nations don’t want.
- Study: After St. George’s Hospital in The UK ended its mask mandate for staff and visitors for some, but not all, wards, there was no difference in Covid infections between the two settings.
- Meta analysis of 2,168 studies finds that wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic led to negative health consequences, including itching, headaches, and restriction of oxygen.
- Aaron Carroll: Contra the Cochrane mask study.
- A new wealth tax in Norway causes the rich to leave Norway.
- US compensates people injured by the Covid vaccine for the first time.
- Health care cost effectiveness: how much is a quality adjusted year of life worth?
- A type of jellyfish has achieved immortality.
Why We Need an FDA
I often criticize the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for being stodgy, slow to react and overly risk averse. However, the agency has an important purpose. The forerunner of the FDA dates back to the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. At the time unscrupulous food manufacturers would use red dye to make spoiled beef appear fresh and used formaldehyde as a preservative to make foods last longer. Only a few years prior, Heroin was considered a wonder drug, as a treatment for morphine addiction and as a cough suppressant. Morphine was also once used as an elixir for teething pain in babies.