- The power to define poverty is the power to spend money – a lot of money.
- Mark Pauly questions the wisdom of the GOP’s Medicare reforms requiring price transparency and site neutral payments.
- Survey: Patients find the health care system confusing. They needed a survey to know that?
- Why haven’t we made more progress with personalized (gene-based) medicine?
- “[W]e argue that mink, more so than any other farmed species, pose a risk for the emergence of future disease outbreaks and the evolution of future pandemics.”
Category: Medicare
Friday Links
- Even moderate drinking can interfere with your sex life.(NYT)
- Medicare is spending $800 million a year on stents that are unnecessary and put patients at risk of complications like stroke, heart attack and death.
- Yglesias takes a critical look at the idea that non-pharmaceutical Covid interventions didn’t work.
- Scott Atlas: What to do in the next pandemic.
- Trump’s plan to bring back mental institutions for the homeless is serious.
- Why is the MSM ignoring 400 American “hostages” in Gaza?
Monday Links
- Who delays care because of cost? Only 29% with employer coverage; 37% with Obamacare; 39% with Medicaid and 42% with Medicare.
- Given an average waiting time of 2½ hours before being discharged, how can there be too many emergency care physicians?
- The “surprise billing” solution isn’t working: Only 4% of the roughly 90,000 payment disputes initiated between April and September have been resolved.
- A CMS rule change will lead to $700 million less savings than the CBO estimated when evaluating the act that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Are Older Americans Ripping Us Off?
When Social Security benefits were first paid in 1940, 46 percent of adult males couldn’t even make it to 65, and for those who did, the average additional life expectancy was less than 13 years. For a typical 65-year-old couple today, at least one partner, on average, will likely make it to 90 or beyond
For a typical 65-year-old couple, Social Security and Medicare benefits, adjusted for inflation, are worth over $1.1 million today, compared with $330,000 in 1960.