CBO: competition and price transparency are the best ways to lower private sector health care costs. Nurse fired for refusing to admit she’s a racist. (WSJ) Against hormone therapy for children. When the dangers of one type of drug addiction become widely known, teenagers switch to another addictive drug. (NYT) Why did McKinsey get into the addiction…
Category: Health Insurance
The White House’s Vote-Buying Hunger Games
President Joe Biden announced his Administration’s plan to end hunger by 2030.
President Joe Biden said his administration will commit more than $8 billion in private and public sector funding as part of its plans to end hunger and reduce diet-related disease by 2030.
“I really know we can do this, end hunger in this country, by the year 2030 and lower the toll that diet-related diseases take on far too many Americans,” Biden said at a conference on hunger, nutrition and health in Washington on Wednesday. “This goal is within our reach. Just look at how far we’ve come on child poverty.”
Tuesday Links
- Sen Ron Wyden: Health insurers are running so-called ghost networks, in which providers are listed in networks but don’t actually offer care. Why is he surprised?
- New CMS rule would make it easier for ineligible people to continue receiving benefits and reduce safeguards to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
- Nonprofit hospital chain sucks out profits, while leaving a poor, minority community without essential services.
- Study: More than 80% of people sampled in Greece report witnessing informal (off the books) payments for health care and the number is also high elsewhere in Europe. (Health Affairs, gated) Unfortunately the authors call rationing by price “corruption,” whereas rationing by waiting is apparently a civic duty.
Doctors: Friends Don’t Let Friends Ride Bicycles Stoned
From 2019 to 2020 more than 11,000 patients were treated in hospital emergency rooms for bicycle accidents while high on methamphetamine, marijuana or opioids. Some were also drunk or had been drinking alcohol.
The most common drugs found were methamphetamine (36%); marijuana (32%); and opioids (19%). Nearly a quarter of injured bikers had also been drinking alcohol, the study found.
Researchers speculate that some of the crash victims may have suffered fatal injuries.