- Cancer phobia: In 2017, 21.3 million American women had cancer screening tests even though they were outside the age ranges for recommended screening. 10.1 million men outside the recommended age ranges had a PSA test.
- People with Obamacare health insurance are being switched to other plans without their knowledge or consent by rogue agents.
- Why are expensive cancer treatments excluded from Medicare’s price negotiations?
- Henry Miller: “The vaccines saved 2.9 million lives, prevented 12.5 million hospitalizations, and saved $500 billion in hospitalization.”
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Tuesday Links
- Food stamp households spend a disproportionate share of their food budget on unhealthy items, such as sugary beverages and prepared desserts. And it’s worse than other low-income households who don’t have food stamps.
- Social Security tells Kotlikoff the number of Social Security clawback letters per year is probably closer to 3 million. (It started at 1M in a congressional hearing; then jumped to 2M in answer to a FOIA request by KFF; and now it’s at 3M. (No telling what the real answer is.)
- Less than half of the benefit of Obamacare subsides goes to the newly insured. One-third of it is wasted.
- In 2023, 79 percent of (Obamacare) enrollees received subsidies (up from 44 percent in 2015), at an average cost of $20,739 per enrollee gaining coverage.
Monday Links
- “We find that one-quarter of food-insecure households fall within the top three quintiles of the income distribution and that food-insecure households spend about as much as food-secure households do on food per week.”
- Biden lowers the hammer on short-term insurance: plans can only last 3 months with a 1 month renewal.
- This year alone, the federal government will spend more than $1.1 trillion to fund more than 130 anti-poverty programs. State and local governments will kick in an additional $700 billion, pushing total anti-poverty spending to more than $1.8 trillion. If all that money were given to the poor it would equal $47,493 per person.
- Bob Moffett authors another review of Modernizing Medicare.
- There have been 70 legal changes to Obamacare so far.
Saturday Links
- How an (apparently) serious study of a vegan diet became fodder for a blatant propaganda film.
- Medicaid’s claim denials are higher than in Medicare or commercial insurance.
- GAO: Improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid top $100B. The number for Medicare Advantage is $17B – a little more than half of the total for traditional Medicare.
- Oprah ignores the downside of weight loss drugs.
- Jim Capretta reviews Obamacare – including all the provisions that either didn’t work or have been repealed.
- After completely screwing up Covid tests, the FDA now wants control of all other laboratory developed tests.