- How Medicare is lowering the quality of health care.
- Another unfunded liability: public sector pensions.
- How Kamala Harris’s proposed housing subsidies would affect the housing market.
- Cost of the tax subsidy for employer provided heath insurance: $300 billion in 2023 and $5.6 trillion over the next decade. 88 percent of the benefit goes to households with above median incomes.
- CBO on the IRA bill: it is possible that the entirety of the law’s projected deficit reduction will never occur.
- The Green revolution isn’t happening: Despite a $1 trillion taxpayer “investment” in renewable energy, we still meet 80% of our energy needs from old-fashioned fossil fuels.
- The Code of Federal Regulations contains 1,089,462 restrictions (at the end of 2022), measured by the frequency of the keywords “shall,” “must,” “may not,” “required,” and “prohibited,” more than double the number at the end of 1970.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Thursday Links
- Scott Atlas: What we know and what we ignored about lockdowns.
- Waiting times for breast cancer surgery in the UK: more egalitarian than you would guess.
- It looks like ghost guns are not going to survive SCOTUS.
- Kamala has a new way to spend your money: home care for the elderly.
- NBER inequality study: The overlapping effects of different preferences for work and different levels of skills acquisition account for a hefty share of overall differences in lifetime earnings…. In other words, income inequality is in part a matter of choice rather than intractable economic or social forces.
- The United States spends only 5 to 7 cents of every health care dollar on primary care, versus 12 to 15 cents per dollar in most other high-income countries.
Wednesday Links
- CBO: Drug importation and a slew of other oft-debated drug pricing policies would have little to no effect on cutting prices.
- Henderson on Stiglitz.
- Charles Sauer: CDC’s advisory committee to recommend lowering the age for the pneumonia vaccination to 50.
- Federal funds now directly support the purchase of 79 percent of Obamacare plans, while the majority of enrollees receive plans entirely paid for by federal taxpayers.
- Virtual physical therapy, once a niche service, has gone mainstream.
WSJ: OTC Hearing Aids Not Selling Well, Returned Too Often
…the Wall Street Journal reports that, at least so far, OTC hearing aids have been a bust. Only about 2% of people with mild hearing loss have purchased an OTC hearing aid. The problem is many of the OTC hearing aids were not much cheaper than prescription models.