The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is beefing up its scrutiny of private equity investments in health care. This past September the FTC sued U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) and the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe in Houston federal court. The investors are accused of buying up a significant portion of large anesthesia practices in major Texas cities, allowing them to aggressively boost prices. FTC chair, Lina Khan, claims private equity investors “bought up the largest anesthesiology practices, then jacked up prices and entered into price-setting and market-allocation schemes.” Research has found that physician prices rose due to private equity investments.
Category: Health Insurance
Wednesday Links
- Kaiser: the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance coverage was $23,968 in 2023.
- Study: Fentanyl “accounts for 90% of all opioid deaths… We show that a substantial amount of fentanyl smuggling occurs via legal trade flows.”
- In 2021, the U.S. spent $1,432 per capita on pharmaceuticals compared to only $517 in the UK. One reason: the value of a statistical life in the UK is pegged at £20,000 – £30,000, compared to $100,000 – $150,000 in the US.
- Headline I wish hadn’t seen: New York City will pay homeowners up to $395,00 to build an extra dwelling in their garage or basement to help ease the housing shortage.
- Gene Steuerle’s NYT piece on how much seniors get from the government’s elderly entitlement programs is no longer behind a paywall. Fascinating graphs.
Four Year Wait to See a Dermatologist in the UK’s National Health Service
The dermatologist examined my skin and he wrote me a prescription for a steroid cream. My entire visit was only $86. I scheduled minor surgery for a month later, which cost around $560 including a pathology report and a free, post surgery follow-up visit. My dermatologist gives uninsured patients a cash discount similar to the Medicare price. He also throws in free services, like writing a prescription for eczema since I was already in his office.
Contrast my experience seeing a Dallas dermatologist with patients from the United Kingdom. In the UK there is very little cost-sharing or out-of-pocket payments for services covered by the National Health Service (NHS).
Monday Links
- AI is better than Dear Abby. HT: Tyler
- Commonwealth Fund: having insurance doesn’t mean health care is affordable. Missing: the observation that Obamacare has made the problem worse.
- The meaning of the Cigna settlement with the government: Medicare Advantage plans should be held accountable for submitting accurate risk adjustment data.
- Which is better: for-profit or nonprofit? All the evidence, much of which Effective Altruists helped to compile, shows that nonprofits are much more likely to be fraudulent, or to simply fail to achieve their goals.
- Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky makes two claims: one possibly true (there is no free will) and one very wrong (it is unfair to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior). The first claim is irrelevant because we experience the world as though we have free will, and we have no alternative to that. And, the reason to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior is the utilitarian desire to get more of the former and less of the latter.
- [This is also an example of the fallacy of the stolen concept. If you claim there is no good or bad behavior because there is no free will, you can’t turn around and use ethics to condemn the rewarding and the punishing.]