Drugs are the most efficient of all medical therapies, representing only about 8.8% of national health expenditures. By contrast, at $864.6 billion in 2021, Americans spent more than twice as much on physician care and 3.5 times as much on hospital care. Over-the-counter (OTC) drugs are especially economical, most of which were once prescription drugs. OTC drugs represent between 1% and 2% of medical spending.
Category: Health Insurance
Saturday Links
- How Obamacare denied one family’s daughter the cancer care she needed.
- Did a Fauci advisor intentionally delete or destroy records relating to the origins of COVID-19?
- Kings and Queens theory: as income goes up, fertility goes down.
- High-heat neighborhoods can be 5 to 20 degrees hotter than surrounding neighborhoods. And a lot of other facts I bet you don’t know,
- Trump’s “Opportunity Zones” (created by the 2017 tax reform bill) are producing disappointing results. Enterprise Zones were an idea imported from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain by Heritage Foundation scholar Stuart Butler. The original idea was to create mini-Hong Kongs in otherwise dilapidated areas. What happened was no deregulation, only tax cuts and subsidies. I predicted from day one that if all you do is offer tax cuts, the experiment will turn into a special interest scam and Hong Kong will never emerge from the rubble. It appears I was right.
Wednesday Links
- Life expectancy for men in the U.S. falls to 73 years — six years less than for women.
- Noah Smith lauds Singapore but neglects to mention Medisave accounts.
- What discount rate should be used in evaluating changes in health policies?
- Should medical screenings be based on cost/benefit analysis or on the patient’s willingness to pay?
- A tribute to Vernon Smith – long time friend of the Goodman Institute.
- Does the case for a free society depend on the existence of free will?
Should Employers Fund Rare Disease Research and Therapies?
Included in Friday Links (November 10) was the title, “Would coverage for gene therapies make employer-based health insurance unaffordable?” That raises an important question: How much should employers (and employees) be required to pay for hyper-expensive therapies very few people need? A related question: should the purpose of employee health coverage be to recruit and retain workers or fund rare disease research and therapies?