When I was a kid we never threw out unused prescription medications. Antibiotics and pain relievers were especially always saved and used, sometimes not necessarily by the person to whom they were prescribed. Of course, drugs that had a very specific purpose like my mother’s thyroid medication were not shared for obvious reasons. If a prescription brand or strength was change the old pills would languish in the bathroom medicine cabinet. As unorthodox as this may sound, it’s catching on with states, sort of.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Wednesday Links
- Against FDA regulation of lab tests.
- More than $185 million of Covid relief money has been approved for projects related to golf courses. The Biden Treasury Department wants to let states spend $90 billion more of “leftover emergency money.”
- In the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, per capita mortality varied by more than a hundredfold across countries, despite most implementing similar nonpharmaceutical interventions.
- Shouldn’t hospitals know if their patients are dead? “About 19 percent of deceased patients overall were deemed alive in their records. What’s more, dead patients received more than 200 telephone calls and 300 portal messages after their death.”
Why Are Nonprofit Hospitals Focused More on Dollars Than Patients?
Nonprofit hospitals … are supposed to serve the public good in exchange for being exempt from federal, state and local taxes — exemptions that added up to $28 billion in 2020.
[Yet] detailed media reports show them hounding poor patients for money, cutting nurse staffing too aggressively and giving preferential treatment to the rich over the poor….
Tuesday Links
- British Medicaid Journal: “The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.”
- How the newspapers are getting life expectancy projections wrong.
- Cigna Removes Prior Authorization for 25% of Medical Services.
- Merrill Matthews explains why seniors are over-paying for drugs.
- Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue. HT: Tyler