Federal government bureaucrats love health insurance. It’s almost like a religion. They believe in health insurance for its own sake. If you pay $500 a month for health coverage that you don’t use, that’s fine because someone else in your risk pool will use it. It’s like going to church. You should just do it and the feds encourage it.
Category: Health Reform
Thursday Links
- A reminder: The Cuban health care system is far from the best in the world and nothing about it warrants extraordinary praise.
- “In the past few weeks, there’s been an explosion of new tools for programming DNA and RNA.”
- “We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology.”
- “Once groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines became available a year into the pandemic, rich countries looked out for themselves and poorer countries were largely left behind.”
- AI can handle customer calls better than humans.
Wednesday Links
- Claim: Sociopaths are not all bad. HT: Tyler
- Leap year explained.
- How the Paragon Health Institute proposes to reform Medicare Advantage.
- How the Alliance of Community Health Plans proposes to reform Medicare Advantage. Some of the recommendations are very similar.
- About 86 million U.S. adults age 20 or older have total cholesterol levels. Almost half of U.S. adults (45.5%) who could benefit from cholesterol medicine are not taking it.
Long-Term Medical-Assisted Opioid Treatment Works, but is Underutilized
Last week I wrote that more than 100,000 Americans die every year from drug overdoses in the United States. In the 12-month period ended in September 2023, 111,380 Americans had died. As recently as 2015 the number of Americans overdosing was less than half of recent figure.
Opioids, specifically fentanyl, are most often the cause of overdose deaths. The RAND Corporation released a study that found that 42% of American adults personally know someone who died by overdose. Furthermore, of those four-in-ten adults who know someone who died of an overdose the average number of people they know who died is two.