- Tomas Philipson: My calculations suggest that Medicare price controls will actually increase total health care spending by at least $30 billion over 20 years.
- More than 50,000 hospitals now qualify as “safety net” institutions that qualify for 340B status.
- A 2022 survey estimated that 100 million Americans carry medical debt, and nearly 80 percent of medical debt is held by households with zero or negative net worth.
- While increases in profits and cash reserves of nonprofit hospitals grow, charity care does not.
- KFF: health insurers operating through the federal exchanges denied 1 in 5 claims in 2023.
- “The cash price for a colonoscopy within a ten-mile radius of midtown Manhattan ranges from a low of $580 to a high of $4,355.”
Category: Medicare
Thursday Links
- Some universities get two-thirds of NIH grant money as “overhead.”
- “Trump should reinstate Obama’s moratorium on risky biological research.”
- Do ultra processed foods cause depression?
- Can weight loss drugs ruin your sex life? (NYT)
- From the time the FDA approves a medical device it takes 5.7 years before Medicare starts paying for it.
- Trump finally deals with the National Straw Crisis.
Sunday Links
- Gingrich: Goodman Institute is right on eliminating waste.
- Why we had a baby boom.
- Betsy DeVos: “Since its creation in 1979, the Department of Education has sent well more than $1 trillion to schools with the express purpose of closing the gaps between the highest and lowest performers. Today, those gaps are as wide as they have ever been, and by many measures, even wider.”
- Forever chemicals: “No one has figured out how to destroy the compounds, whose fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable in organic chemistry, at scale.”
- Why is the CDC sitting on three bird flu studies?
- A Medicaid block grant would save $670 billion over 10 years.
Friday Links
- There is a long history of presidents not spending all of the money Congress has authorized.
- Traditional Medicare enrollees receive more high-risk medications than Medicare Advantage enrollees.
- Steuerle: to find waste in government, ask the employees.
- Controversial Super Bowl ad that attacks other drug companies for their weight loss drugs.
- Cato: is public health a danger to our health?