Hospitals are the worst place to receive care if there are any other choices. Hospital prices are far higher than the same services available elsewhere. I often tell the story of my wife unknowingly checking on getting a CT scan at a hospital outpatient facility. She discovered that her share of the cost was going to be $2,700. That wasn’t the price; that was just her share of the cost. The price was higher. I quickly found a free-standing radiology clinic willing to do the same procedure for $403. Why was it lower? It wasn’t that one CT scanner was better than the other. It was that one was at the hospital where prices are always higher.
Category: Health Economics & Costs
Saturday Links
- In defense of drug decriminalization: what Oregon and Portugal got wrong: Jacob Sullum and Jeffrey Singer.
- Biden’s attack on Short-term insurance is not only bad policy, it’s cruel.
- Cato: Extend OTC status to all birth control pills, not just one.
- Why it ls hard to know whether you own your own cells.
- If you give people a free 10k, what will they do with it? HT: Tyler
- Dylan Scott asks: Why doesn’t health insurance pay for more mental heath therapy?
- I answered this question more than two decades ago: here, here and here.
Friday Links
- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen: “The best place to hide and launder ill-gotten gains is actually the United States.”
- The rise and fall of cities: Detroit has one of the highest homicide rates in the United States, experienced a 61% population decrease from 1950-2010, and between 2005-2015, one in three Detroit properties has been foreclosed on.
- The left digit bias in medicine. Recommended
- Tyler Cowen on the cost of climate change: Imagine someone telling you, “the world won’t attain the year 2100 standard of living until 2102.”
- Overboard incidents — falling, jumping or being thrown — are the leading cause of death on cruise ships.
- Fauci’s replacement, Jeanne Marrazzo, “has almost an unblemished record of being wrong on every issue related to COVID.”
Thursday Links
- Right-of-center opponents of dropping the A bomb on Japan include Herbert Hoover and Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
- After Portland decriminalized small amounts of illicit drugs, it got …. more drug use! (NYT)
- The judge, on the Biden administration’s censorship of Covid info: It was “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” (WSJ)
- What Trump did on price transparency and why it matters.
- From Australia to Zimbabwe, governments are raiding each other’s health systems in a worldwide hunt for medical workers. (WSJ)