The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is beefing up its scrutiny of private equity investments in health care. This past September the FTC sued U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) and the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe in Houston federal court. The investors are accused of buying up a significant portion of large anesthesia practices in major Texas cities, allowing them to aggressively boost prices. FTC chair, Lina Khan, claims private equity investors “bought up the largest anesthesiology practices, then jacked up prices and entered into price-setting and market-allocation schemes.” Research has found that physician prices rose due to private equity investments.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Friday Links
- Biden v. Trump on Covid
- With symptoms, a colonoscopy is costly. Without symptoms, the test is free. The same thing is true of mammograms. It’s Obamacare.
- The healing power of music
- The Gates foundation achieved a remarkable reduction in childhood deaths in the middle of a war zone in Mali.
- Stats on Florida v California for people who care about the DeSantis/Newsom debate.
- An unflattering recap of the life of Henry Kissinger.
The Future of Primary Care: AI Doctor in a Phone Booth
Artificial intelligence applications have been in the news lately. I’m especially interested in medical applications. I’ve previously written about using AI to help radiologists interpret X-rays and diagnostic images. Computer-aided radiology interpretation has been around for a few years and has gotten to the point where AI can catch things that radiologists miss. The New York Times worries about whether AI is ready to manage patient care. The consensus seems to be that although it may be premature at the moment it soon will be.
Thursday Links
- Alex Tabarrok reviews The Big Fail. Best sentence: “Anti-lockdown was probably the dominant expert opinion prior to COVID.”
- Biden invokes the Defense Production Act to stem drug shortages. This is a Cold War-era law that lets the government require private companies to make materials deemed necessary for national defense.
- Jason Furman on the 2017 Trump tax reform bill: It showed “taxes actually do matter,” adding that it provided “the most convincing estimates of the response of investment to corporate tax changes that I have ever seen.”
- Imagine getting medical-test results within minutes or seconds, before you leave the doctor’s office. That’s more likely for your dog than it is for you. (WSJ)
- Why cold symptoms are worse at night. (NYT)