- More on America’s unusually short life expectancy: the absolute gap is mostly overdoses, homicides, and car accidents.
- What’s wrong with BBB lite?
- Should uncompensated house work (including child care) count as part of GDP? Peter Thiel vs. Arnold Kling.
- David Henderson and Casey Mulligan: Why Biden is virtually engineering a recession.
- Jason Shafrin on Grossman’s classic human capital model of the demand for health care.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
How Does US Health Care Compare to Other Countries?
A paper from Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho delves into this:
- “The US appears to screen more vigorously for cancer than Europe and people in the US who are diagnosed with cancer have higher 5-year survival probabilities.”
- There is a similar, though not quite as strong, pattern with cardiovascular disease — it is treated more aggressively on average in the U.S., and survival odds are better.
- A detailed survey of prostate cancer evidence shows that “The combination of earlier detection and aggressive treatment in the US has produced greatly improved survival chances for men diagnosed with prostate cancer.”
- Similarly for breast cancer, America does more early screening and more aggressive treatment with the result that “the US has experienced a significantly faster decline in breast cancer mortality than comparison countries.”
Tuesday Links
- Jeffrey Singer: More on Monkeypox Deja Vu
- Having bombs explode around you when you are young affects your mental health later on. Why do researchers conduct studies like this? Nothing else to do?
- Is anyone truly resistant to Covid?
- Court: drug companies can’t help Medicare enrollees pay what their insurance doesn’t cover either with copay coupons or through charities. (paywall)
- The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that extending Obamacare subsidies would cost about $45 billion next year and $495 billion over a decade. (WSJ)
Babies Aren’t Cheap (even with good insurance)
A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that out-of-pocket costs for childbirth run nearly $3,000 for insured women in large group plans. Out-of-pocket costs represented about 15% of the average cost for pregnancy, childbirth, and post-partum care, which were nearly $19,000 on average. This was supposedly a travesty.