- Transparency: Hospitals still don’t want you to know how much you are going to have to pay. CMS has issued nearly 500 warning notices and over 230 requests for corrective action. The penalty for non-compliance in 2022 is up to $5,500 per day (more than $2 million a year).
- Hospitals still don’t want you to know what you are going to be charged: Nearly 500 get a warning from CMS.
- Study: 57 percent of nurses felt “exhausted” over the past two weeks, 43 percent felt “burned out,” and just 20 percent said they felt valued.
- Light pollution: one-third of the people in the world can’t see the Milky Way. (NYT)
- Not following the science. The most rigorous and comprehensive study to date: masks don’t work. CDC tells schools to require them anyway.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Wednesday Links
- Covid lockdown measures worldwide reduced the seismic noise of the planet by up to 50 percent.
- Canadian study: for roughly half the population, drinking coffee increases the risk of kidney dysfunction.
- The federal government is now required to engage in explicitly racist hiring.
- David Henderson: The “1619 Project” on Hula vindicates Capitalism (WSJ)
- The generic drug market isn’t as competitive as we thought.
- Digital health: The share of U.S. adults who said they use health applications has grown 6 percentage points to 40% since December 2018, while the share of adults who said they use wearables has grown by 8 points to 35%.
Monday Links
- George Halvorson defends Obamacare (but mainly a reformed Medicare Advantage program).
- Does the obese character in The Whale really deserve our sympathy?
- Medicare Advantage enrollment is now 31.2 million – roughly half of the Medicare population.
- DOL: The low-end estimate for improper (Covid) unemployment insurance payments – mostly fraud – is $191 billion.
- Estimates attribute 15 – 30 percent of total national health spending to administration, with at least half ($300 – $600 billion a year) demonstrated to be ineffective or wasteful.
How Much Waste in Health Care?
A recent analysis from the Peterson Foundation found that the U.S. is spending over $1,000 per person on administrative costs, “five times more than the average of other wealthy countries and more than we spend on preventive or long-term healthcare.”
A piece by Dr. Robert Kocher published in 2013 in the Harvard Business Review found that over 22 years (1990– 2012), there was a 75% increase in the number of workers in our nation’s health system, but the overwhelming majority (95%) were in non-doctor positions. In fact, for every one doctor there were sixteen non-doctor workers, and 10 of those were “purely administrative and management staff, receptionists and information clerks, and office clerks.” The sheer size of the administrative arm of American health care had become daunting.