- “The crackdown on [opioid] pain pills replaced legally manufactured, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy black-market products of unknown provenance and composition. Meanwhile, prohibition fostered the rise of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute.”
- Jeffrey Singer testified with the same message. He was the Democrats’ witness!
- Telemedicine is being widely used in Ukraine.
- Paragon: In 2019, New York (state per capita income: $67,366) received $17,145 in federal Medicaid funding per person in poverty, while Alabama (state per capita income: $43,288) received $6,148.
- CBO’s options for reducing health care spending: establishing caps on federal spending for Medicaid; limiting state taxes on providers; reducing the federal Medicaid match rates; increasing Medicare Part B premiums; reducing Medicare Advantage benchmarks; and reducing the tax subsidies for employment-based insurance, etc. What about a free market for health care?
Category: Health Reform
Monday Links
- The IRA bill threatens orphan drugs.
- Study finds links between the popular zero-calorie sugar substitute erythritol and an increased risk of cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke.
- But the study has limits. (NYT)
- Death on demand: Canadian euthanasia is killing about 27 people a day on average — over 10,000 a year.
“Escape >From the Lab” is Not Just Theory
“What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.
“The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.
“It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so. “It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and leading expert on biosafety.
Hospitals Ignoring Price Transparency Rule; CMS Ignoring Hospitals’ Noncompliance
Prices in health care are often difficult to obtain and meaningless when you obtain them. There is not one price but dozens of prices depending on who the payer is. There are different prices for Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealth. There is the pricemaster (list) price that almost nobody pays. The chargemaster price is often the official cash price if you lack insurance coverage and don’t inquire prior to care. Then there is the cash price if you negotiate in advance of care, which is often lower than the list price. If you were to inquire about the price, assuming you were told a price at all, you would likely be given the pricemaster charge for a specific billing code without information about which billing codes belong together. You see, a knee surgery isn’t one code, it’s numerous codes so hospitals can bill for numerous services.