- CIA whistle blower: the agency bribed analysts to cover up the covid lab leak.
- Do you know the difference between “bagging” vs “buy and bill”? You may be spending too much for prescription drugs if you don’t.
- Panel: Sudafed doesn’t work. I happen to know it does.
- Opioid penetration map – county by county data. (WP)
- Why did the Surgeon General’s report on loneliness ignore the pen pal remedy?
- A new Human Rights Watch report: “Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.”
- Generic drugs save consumers $338 billion every year.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Wednesday Links
- How widespread is the bias against men?
- A Medicare beneficiary with obesity costs $2,018 more than a non-obese beneficiary.
- Study: obesity drugs could save Medicare as much as $100 billion per year.
- NEJM counter study: obesity drugs could cause CMS budget to skyrocket.
- Is Medicare Advantage a bad deal for rural hospitals?
Insurers are Marking Up Drugs that Should be Cheap
Why do people buy health insurance? The most often cited reason is to transfer the risk of illness to a third party by paying a premium. University of Minnesota economist John Nyman has studied this for many years. He argues that people buy health insurance as an income transfer in the event they become sick. People who are ill often lose their income and health insurance pays a benefit that patients would use their income on. A commenter on the NCPA Health Blog a few years ago said he believed that people buy health insurance for the negotiated discounts. That makes a lot of sense.
Why Health Care is Not Competitive and How to Fix It
Technology is a significant driver of high health care spending. For instance, many treatments common today were not available 50, 40 or even 30 years ago. There are far more drugs and medical procedures than there were in the 1990s when I first began studying health care. Yet, treatments and therapies that have been in use for decades are still quite expensive. In typical consumer markets, the quality of technology gets progressively better while the inflation-adjusted prices often falls as older technology is surpassed by newer technology. This is especially true of consumer electronics but also true of automobiles, appliances and other types of consumer goods.