- In Fixing Food, Richard A. Williams, a 30-year cost-benefit analyst at the FDA, says the agency isn’t protecting the public. Book review here.
- John Cochrane video on free market health insurance.
- Nearly 5 million people are paying no premium at all for their Obamacare Insurance. (WSJ) But if they had the cash, almost all of them would do something else with it.
- Next big thing in cannabis: a gentler high that offers relaxation and pain relief without the anxiety or fuzzy-headedness of regular weed.
- In Vancouver, you can get a fentanyl high for free – courtesy of the Canadian public health system.
- Kim Bellard at The Health Care Blog admits he has been wrong. About his belief in managed care? Or, managed competition? Or, his failure to appreciate the power of markets? Or, patient power? No. None of these. He was wrong because he hoped people would care more about health and more about patients than profits. Not exactly the mea culpa we were looking for.
Category: Health Insurance
How Does US Health Care Compare to Other Countries?
A paper from Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho delves into this:
- “The US appears to screen more vigorously for cancer than Europe and people in the US who are diagnosed with cancer have higher 5-year survival probabilities.”
- There is a similar, though not quite as strong, pattern with cardiovascular disease — it is treated more aggressively on average in the U.S., and survival odds are better.
- A detailed survey of prostate cancer evidence shows that “The combination of earlier detection and aggressive treatment in the US has produced greatly improved survival chances for men diagnosed with prostate cancer.”
- Similarly for breast cancer, America does more early screening and more aggressive treatment with the result that “the US has experienced a significantly faster decline in breast cancer mortality than comparison countries.”
Babies Aren’t Cheap (even with good insurance)
A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that out-of-pocket costs for childbirth run nearly $3,000 for insured women in large group plans. Out-of-pocket costs represented about 15% of the average cost for pregnancy, childbirth, and post-partum care, which were nearly $19,000 on average. This was supposedly a travesty.
Friday Links
- AMA encourages doctors to learn health economics. They even have their own online course. Haven’t checked it out, but I suspect it is more sociology than economics.
- Amazon wants to be your doctor.
- Déjà vu: Monkeypox testing looks like the Covid testing fiasco all over again.
- “probably half of all Covid infections have happened this calendar year — and it’s only July.”
- Insulin bill in the Senate looks like a done deal.