- Why Medicare’s negotiated prices may not help patients. Formularies, step therapy and more.
- Blood supply has steadily decreased for over a decade, reaching critically low levels in the past two years.
- Another study on site neutral payments: Medicare Part B spending would have been $7,750 less for a hypothetical breast cancer patient.
- Opinion: Bidenomics is driving up the cost of health care.
Category: Health Reform
Tuesday Links
- “Many older people are one medical emergency away from a court-appointed guardian taking control of their lives.”
- The hypothalamus, a cone shaped part of the human brain no bigger than an almond, affects whether we feel hungry and helps control our metabolism. (NYT)
- Kansas and Virginia Medicaid programs paid MCOs for beneficiaries who were dead. (InsideHealthPolicy paywall)
- Solution to rural health care: telemedicine. But you need an internet connection.
Drowsy Driving is a Public Health Hazard
By now everyone knows that driving under the influence is bad. Indeed, nearly one-third of all traffic fatalities involve a drunk driver. More than half (56%) of drivers involved in an injury or fatal car crash were on at least one drug (including alcohol) at the time that impaired their ability to drive. When I took flying lessons, we were warned that OTC cold medicines and flying is not allowed. The FAA has an explicit list of medication types that pilots cannot ingest while flying. An FAA study found the most common drug in the body of pilots involved in fatal aviation accidents was diphenhydramine (brand name Benadryl).
Monday Links
- The power to define poverty is the power to spend money – a lot of money.
- Mark Pauly questions the wisdom of the GOP’s Medicare reforms requiring price transparency and site neutral payments.
- Survey: Patients find the health care system confusing. They needed a survey to know that?
- Why haven’t we made more progress with personalized (gene-based) medicine?
- “[W]e argue that mink, more so than any other farmed species, pose a risk for the emergence of future disease outbreaks and the evolution of future pandemics.”