- 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?
Category: Medicare
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.
Commonwealth Fund: Medical Care is Expensive and Many People Find it Unaffordable
The Commonwealth Fund (a proponent of Big Government health care) released its 2023 health care survey that found about half of Americans have problems affording health care.
Given the necessity of insurance to defray the full cost of health care in the United States, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the vast majority of people who had spent some time uninsured during the year would report difficulty affording their health care costs. More surprising is the large share of adults who had insurance all year but still report difficulty paying health care expenses.