In 1951, Congress stopped letting drug makers decide which drugs they would sell over the counter and which would require a prescription and turned that decision over to the FDA. Drugs already available without a prescription were “grandfathered.”
That is why, to this day, people can buy regular and NPH insulin without a prescription. Because those forms of insulin are off‐patent and because consumers comparison‐shop, they are relatively cheap: “ReliOn,” a brand available from Walmart, can cost as little as $25 a vial. Evidence suggests that prescription requirements correlate with higher drug prices and that removing them correlates with reductions in drug prices.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Thursday Links
- Arnold Kling gives an (admittedly Jewish) view of why Christianity is unravelling.
- Claim: social media is a major cause of depression – especially in teen girls.
- Turns out its worse if the girls are politically liberal.
- There are 34 million Health Savings Accounts, holding almost $100 billion.
- Biden accuses MAGA Republicans of wanting to cut health care spending. This is after the Democrats’ IRA bill cut $307 billion out of Medicare (CBO report, p, 72) and the administration plans future large cuts in Medicare Advantage.
Would You See an AI Doctor?
The term artificial intelligence (AI) has been in use for many years. Indeed, it includes many names, such as AI, neural networks, machine learning and a few other buzzwords. The preceding linked article from IBM tries to explain the meaning of all these terms. A few years ago, IBM made headlines as the developer of Watson, which famously competed on the game show Jeopardy, beating Ken Jennings. There is a new AI interface on the Internet that anyone can try out called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a language-based AI chatbot that can do many things humans can do, including correcting computer code, writing college entrance essays and a host of other things.
China has Health Savings Accounts
And they have had them for a decade. As the New York Times explains:
Companies typically contribute to the pools an amount equal to as much as 9.8 percent of a worker’s salary…. The employee insurance pools currently forward about a third of the money they receive from employers to personal health accounts, and spend the remaining two-thirds on hospitalizations and other expenses. Employees also put about 2 percent of their paychecks into their health accounts until they retire.
While the pooled employee funds in many cities are depleted, personal health accounts across China have accumulated more than $130 billion.