The United States spends nearly $5 trillion on medical care and health-related activities each year. Health expenditure consumes nearly 20% of gross domestic product (GDP). Yet, economists and business analysts claim the health care industry is hemorrhaging money, with bankruptcies on the rise year after year.
Category: Medicare
Groups Help Prevent Homelessness Among Seniors
Where do you plan to live when you grow old? That is a question 70 million Baby Boomers, millions who came before them and untold millions born after them will have to answer at some point. It will become a national problem as Baby Boomers squeeze elderly housing institutions like they did every other institution they encountered at every stage of their lives. Senior housing is already expensive, and it will become even more expensive in the coming years.
Saturday Links
- Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare enrollees get about the same amount of dental, hearing, and vision care. MA patients pay less out of pocket.
- in 2019, mean monthly out-of-pocket costs were estimated to be $440 in Medicare Advantage compared with $579 in fee-for-service Medicare. (That’s $1,668 a year difference.)
- Ippolito on the prospects for Medicare Advantage reform.
- Social cost of measles outbreak in Texas: $35.4 million. Social cost of vaccines that could have prevented measles: $40,000–$115,000.
- Real, inflation-adjusted, federal domestic spending per person is now more than 2.5 times what it was in 1980, while total government spending and tax subsidies at all levels exceed $90,000 per household.
- Why hospital price transparency regulations aren’t working: “Many hospitals can easily afford the small fine and keep breaking the law.”
Thursday Links
- Some hospitals get to be urban (using urban wage indexes for calculating Medicare reimbursements) and rural (benefiting from Medicare policies solely intended to support rural health) at the same time.
- Biden era Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT): It took the IRS two years and 600 pages of explanation to provide compliance instructions for businesses hit by CAMT, and still the introduction of the tax stalled around unresolvable administrative problems.
- Bloomberg editors: $50B is not enough to save rural hospitals.
- The downside of the adoption industry.
- People who believe that life (with a soul) begins at conception have a problem with IVF. That’s always been true, even though it’s taken many years to sink in for most of them. That said, there is really nothing more to say, in my opinion. Yet, Scott Alexander has found a way to talk about this problem for page after page after page. Go figure.