- Humans living in the Bronze Age used hallucinogens.
- AEI: work requirements for welfare benefits actually work.
- AI is assisting doctors, not replacing them. It produces better diagnoses and helps avoid prescription errors. (WSJ)
- Anti-Covid measures didn’t keep people from getting Covid; but they did almost wipe out the flu. (WSJ)
- Health Affairs study: From 21–61 percent of enrollees in ACA plans paid for preventive services that are supposed to be free.
Category: Health Reform
Withdrawal Pains: Covid Welfare State is Disbanding
In the early, panicked days of the pandemic, the United States government did something that was previously unimaginable. It transformed itself, within weeks, into something akin to a European-style welfare state.
Why Is American Life Expectancy Tanking? It’s the Early Death of the Young
Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon….
Saturday Links
- How parents decide when and how to punish their children. It’s similar to the principles of criminal law.
- Reducing carbon emissions through subsidies (the Biden/IRA approach) costs 6 times as much as a carbon tax.
- Why the Medicare Trustees report is too optimistic: It assumes the birth rate in the long-run will increase to a nearly full native replacement of 2.0 children per woman, despite a steady and now long-standing fall to around 1.65.
- 80% of new treatments in the pharmaceutical pipeline originate in the U.S. That’s been a Godsend for the more than 55 million people living with dementia across the globe, the tens of millions worldwide who will receive a cancer diagnosis, and the more than 38 million people living with HIV.
- David Henderson’s proposal to cut Medicare spending: offer beneficiaries cash instead of a benefit in kind. I would offer everyone approved for elective surgery half the DRG rate in cash as an alternative. This is actually how some European countries handle long term care.