- AAF study of the effects of Medicare’s coming drug price negotiations: fewer than 6 million beneficiaries – less than 10% of enrollees – will benefit at all and for those with any saving 69% of will save less than $300.
- Given Trump and Biden executive orders promoting the idea, why is it taking so long to allow states to import drugs from Canada?
- Health Affairs authors: giving insulin to patients for free is cost effective. So why don’t insurers – including Medicare Part D insurers – do that? I explained that months ago.
- How health care was rationed during the pandemic: Mississippi case study.
- Left-of-center Tax Policy Center: people earning less than $400,000 will pay more taxes under the new Biden budget proposal. A lot more taxes!
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Saturday Links
- Did you know that commercial airlines have to obey a speed limit?
- Digital therapies that sought FDA approval are expensive and in a regulatory morass. Is there a non-FDA approach that is possible?
- How worried should we be over a drug resistant fungus?
- Views on AI’s risk to humanity.
- Scott Sumner’s take: the worry is not that an intelligent AI will destroy the world. It’s that a depressed person will use AI to destroy the world.
- A different view of the Waco tragedy – one more sympathetic to the Branch Davidians.
Medicare is a Battlefield
Kaiser Health News wrote about The Medicare Wars. Regardless of which party is using Medicare as an issue they will likely accuse the other side of a War on Seniors. A better description than “war” would be scaremongering among politicians to frighten senior voters. KHN chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner reports politicians use Medicare as a scaremongering issue because it works.
How the IRA Bill Subsidizes the Rich
The benchmark premium for an exchange plan in Prescott, Arizona, for a family of five with a 60-year-old household head is $50,923 in 2023.
- If that family made $150,000, they would qualify for a subsidy of $38,173.
- If that family made $350,000, they would qualify for a subsidy of $21,173.
- If that family made $500,000, they would qualify for a subsidy of $8,423.
- This family does not lose subsidy eligibility until they make more than $ 599,000.
The projected cost per newly insured is nearly $14,000 a year over the next decade—a high amount that shows that most of the new spending is simply replacing private spending with government spending.