President Trump wants to bring back drug manufacturing to the United States. Yet, he is unlikely to do so to any significant degree. About 90% of the drugs Americans take are generic drugs. Generic drugs are those that have lost patent protection. The profit margins on generic drugs are slim, and competition is often fierce.
Category: Medical Tourism
Saturday Links
- Dr. Casey Means (the would-be Surgeon General): Doctors make people sicker. (NYT)
- A single submarine can require four tons of rare earths. (NYT)
- A brief history of Obamacare.
- The whole developed world is about to start shrinking. If not for immigration, it already would be.
- How much does AARP get for sponsoring UnitedHealth insurance? $9 billion.
- Cato study: Repealing certificate-of-need (CON) laws increased the number of long-term acute care hospitals (LTACs) by 69 percent and added an average of 558 certified beds per million elderly residents. Furthermore, when LTACs entered the nursing home market, they decreased the rate at which patients in skilled nursing facilities were rehospitalized by 5.9 percent, the number of patients who fell while in care by 5.3 percent, and the number of patients who were physically restrained to their beds by 13 percent.
KFF: Millions of Americans Live in Poor, Rural Dead Zones Lacking Medical Care
Millions of Americans live in areas without a readily available source of medical care that also lack Internet coverage with sufficient bandwidth to make telemedicine feasible. These areas, which tend to be poor and rural, face other obstacles that render residents sicker than average.
Buyer Beware: Some Dentists Profit by Replacing Healthy Teeth with Expensive Implants
Most dentists advise that implants are a last resort when a tooth cannot be saved due to infection. Neither are implants maintenance free. Real human teeth are always better than metal posts tied to a fake tooth. It’s like other areas of life, be skeptical if it sounds too good to be true and get second opinions before agreeing to expensive procedures.