- A bipartisan congressional tax deal sounds very good to us.
- “Having a best friend with a reported serious injury in the previous year increases the probability of own opioid misuse by around 7 percentage points in a population where 17 percent ever misuses opioids.”
- Between 2000 and 2020, Black individuals consistently experienced higher cancer mortality than White individuals for all cancers except female lung and bronchus.
- “Over time, most Latin American countries can expect shrinking populations,” causing lots of economic problems. Recommended
- Why Florida may not save $180 million by importing drugs from Canada. (Bloomberg)
Category: Health Reform
The Cost of Obamacare
According to the KFF subsidy calculator, a 60-year-old with a $100,000 income, has to pay a premium (net of subsidy) of $708 a month or $8496 a year. The annual out-of-pocket exposure is $9,450.
If the individual has costly health problems, he will have to pay $17,946 before the health plan begins paying all other expenses. If his illness is chronic, he must bear this expense every year.
If the individual goes out-of-network, because the plan doesn’t cover the specialty care he needs, the plan pays nothing.
Are Direct-to-Consumer Body Scans Good or Bad? Doctors Say Bad.
Several years ago I got a full-body CT scan. It found a spot on my liver that was “statistically unlikely” to be anything serious. It also found something else that was just a typical anomaly and told me my coronary arteries were in great shape for my age. I don’t recall what else it found but it wasn’t something that changed my life. A few years earlier a relative got a full-body CT scan because of pain in his side that his doctor wasn’t taking seriously. It found kidney stones. Someone else I know got his & her body scans. What all these scans have in common was they were all direct-to-consumer, with no input from their doctors. They were also all paid for in cash.
Tuesday Links
- MLK fact of the day: black men are more likely to graduate from college than go to prison. In 2009, it was the other way around.
- Workers at 22 federal agencies plan a walk out today to protest Biden’s policies affecting Gaza.
- Last year Congress failed to reauthorize key parts of “the single-most impactful US government program ever, saving 25 million lives over the past 20 years.”
- FAA (which regulates the airlines) has a DEI policy that emphasizes recruiting and hiring people with targeted disabilities, including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
- The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine segregates and separates its first-year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin. (WSJ)
- “Gas station heroin” peddled at convenience stores. (NYT)