About 6.7 million senior Americans are living with Alzheimer’s dementia in the United States. This number is expected to double in the next 35 years. The cost of Medicare, hospice care and Medicaid long term care reached $345 billion in 2023, while the cost of unpaid caregiving was even higher. These costs will continue grow and tax the resources of both patients and those providing care.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Thursday Links
- “We find that a ten percent increase in the proportion of county residents with access to broadband internet leads to a 1.01 percent reduction in the number of suicides in a county, as well as improvements in self-reported mental and physical health.”
- Does our personality determine our political ideology? (HT: Tyler)
- Linus Pauling was wrong about vitamin C. But he was less wrong than some other bad nutritional advice.
- Why brain dead people may not actually be dead.
- While physician costs for overhead, medical equipment and supplies, as well as administrative staff, have soared, inflation-adjusted Medicare payments to physicians have dropped by over 25 percent over the past two decades. Commentary.
- “The Office of the Inspector General found that Medicare and Medicaid spent over $18 billion in three years on drugs with accelerated approval but incomplete confirmatory clinical trials.”
The War on Poverty Bred Dependency, including Hospitals, Clinics, Doctors, Drugmakers, etc.
Whenever there are societal problems there are always ambitious politicians who seek to fill a need. If you assume the desire to alleviate poverty and inequity is solely the purview of Western democracies, you would be wrong. Just study political economy and you will find that despots often use poverty and inequity to seize power and maintain it.
Nonprofits That Live Off of Government Grants Are the Problem
Outsourcing government functions to nonprofits is a form of privatization. Importantly, it’s a form of privatization that progressives could accept. But nonprofits have little accountability, causing costs to bloat and services to degrade, and allowing unscrupulous nonprofit execs to pocket taxpayer money. And it’s easy for them to become involved in corrupt relationships with their political patrons.
Source: Noah Smith