- Free covid tests are back.
- Governments at all levels spend nearly $2 trillion annually to fight poverty (not counting payments related to COVID-19). Stretching back to 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson first declared his War on Poverty, anti‐poverty spending has totaled more than $30 trillion.
- Tyler Cowen: It is estimated that about 40% of Americans are obese. If the government paid for those drugs for everyone who might benefit from them, it could cost more than $1 trillion annually, almost as much as the US spends on Medicare each year, (Bloomberg)
- Study: 60-year-old rural men can now expect to live two years less than their urban counterparts – a gap that’s nearly tripled from two decades ago.
- Study: Both moderate and light drinkers experience more cancer deaths than occasional drinkers.
Category: Medicare
Wednesday Links
- “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Here is what that means today if you are covered by Centene, the largest provider of Obamacare insurance in the country.
- Why the British economy is stagnating: “It is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.”
- Most anti-smoking drugs don’t work and the drug companies aren’t anxious to develop new ones. Overly strict FDA regulations are partly to blame. (STAT News)
- New York’s Covid tsar spent the pandemic preaching social distancing while attending raves and sex parties.
- “Healthcare is a centrally controlled market. It is both a monopoly—sole control of supply—and a monopsony—single determinant of demand.”
Tuesday Links
- The AMA says obesity is a disease. But the medical community has never provided a precise definition for obesity as a disease.
- The US does not have mini recessions. (Recommended)
- The per enrollee cost of Medicaid is higher than the average cost in employer plans in almost 20 states, sometimes by a considerable margin.
- Education fail: Not a single child tested proficient in math in 67 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 32 schools. So, what have the Illinois legislature and Governor JB Pritzker done about it? They shut down the Illinois Invest in Kids Scholarship program that allowed kids to attend private schools.
- Cato: Lessons from covid.
Friday Links
- Medicare price negotiation for new drugs may not affect drug company revenues as much as was originally thought.
- 30-year-olds: living on their own and not marrying.
- Cato study: the largest states got the most covid aid (per capita) and this boosted the re-election chances for the incumbents in Congress.
- The left’s answer to the housing crisis: override local zoning ordinances. [Of course, these are congressional liberals. Local liberal are the ones who create the zoning restrictions.]
- New study: there is no evidence supporting affirmative action in medical school admissions.
- It takes 15 years and 2.6 billion dollars to discover, develop, and bring a drug to market.