- GAO: unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic as high as $135 billion. (That is roughly $1,350 for every household in America.)
- Medicare targets cheap, generic, life saving drug for price “negotiation.” (WSJ)
- Rich countries get quality medicines; the poor sometimes get poison. But, contra NYT, the solution is markets, not regulation.
- Court tells the FDA to stop playing doctor. (WSJ)
- As a percent of income, lower-income people cheat more on their income taxes than higher income people. HT: David Henderson
- Did the eradication of hookworms cause modern allergies?
Category: Medicare
Saturday Links
- Did the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) censor a meta study showing that lock downs had no effect on covid?
- A smart pill — the size of a blueberry! — can be used to automatically detect key biological molecules in the gut that suggest problems, and wirelessly transmit the information in real time.
- Robin Hansen: World population will peak in about thirty years, and then will likely fall by half every generation or two.
- How the government sets Medicare prices: it’s “a pattern of combining dated, imprecise cost reports with idiosyncratic and opaque adjustments that were not constructed to guarantee the best outcomes for the dollars spent.”
Dr. ChatGPT Outperforms Dr. Google
Have you ever consulted Dr. Google? When I first began researching Internet-based medicine 25 years ago everyone was amazed that something like 100 million people per year were searching the Internet for health information. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Internet to learn more about one’s own health conditions. In the early days doctors hated it. Articles appeared in medical journals lamenting all the misinformation patients would encounter and the waste of doctors’ time discussing or refuting what their patients found. Looking back these fears seem ludicrous. Respected health care systems, like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, sponsor websites that provide basic but useful information about health and medicine.
Wednesday Links
- How widespread is the bias against men?
- A Medicare beneficiary with obesity costs $2,018 more than a non-obese beneficiary.
- Study: obesity drugs could save Medicare as much as $100 billion per year.
- NEJM counter study: obesity drugs could cause CMS budget to skyrocket.
- Is Medicare Advantage a bad deal for rural hospitals?