- When a key employee leaves: OpenAI is in open chaos.
- More on Sam Altman: he believed his company’s products could kill us all.
- Social Security’s Widows Scam: Some 13,000 widows have been effectively defrauded out of over $130 million dollars.
- 59 percent of Americans say money can buy happiness. How much money? Around $1.2 million.
- Why choice of a doctor matters: Between the top and bottom quartiles of spending, 79% of the difference is due to utilization and 19% is due to a difference in prices.
Category: Health Insurance
What Is a Drug? Philosopher Struggles but the FDA Has its Own Definition
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.
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?