- Biden Budget: more spending on the elderly: crumbs for the children. (Kids don’t vote.)
- 17,000 families in Illinois alone have lost homes to Medicaid recovery since 2021. (NYT)
- The ACCESS Act allows low-income families to redirect a portion of their (Obamacare) subsidies into a tax-advantaged health savings account (HSA).
- “The biggest deficits are showing up in the blue states that received massive [Covid] handouts … and are now facing the day of reckoning.”
- How much is a patient’s life worth in the UK?
Category: News and Events
Should Patient Assistance Programs Count Towards Your Deductible (should they even be legal?)
Demand curves are downward sloping. There I said it! It’s apparently controversial to many public health advocates and Members of Congress. All the while, supply curves slope upward. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you should not have slept through your Econ 101 class in college. You can boil this down to “people buy less when prices rise” and “incentives matter.”
Wednesday Links
- “We estimate the costs of lockdowns were at least 10 times higher than the public health benefits. Fewer than 10.000 lives were saved but hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, while the economic and educational losses are in the multiple trillions of dollars.”
- For $500,000, you can have a meal in space.
- A Republican bill would ban DEI in medical schools: No racist teaching; no racial discrimination; no loyalty oaths; and no DEI offices. (WSJ)
- Viagra could be good for your brain.
- During the pandemic, Paxlovid was free — courtesy of the federal government. Now it cost $1,600.
- Why is Oprah Winfrey shilling for Eli Lilly?
The Good and the Bad of Medicaid Long Term Care Estate Recovery
I went to stay with an old friend and his family for the 4th of July holiday weekend a few years ago. The house next door was a little overgrown because my friends’ neighbor had gone into a nursing home. A year or so later I was back visiting for the weekend when the neighbor’s son was moving into the house after his father died. I heard a similar story with a neighbor of mine, when both parents spent time in a nursing home before they died. When the last parent died their only asset was a house, which was later sold, and the proceeds split among their offspring. In both cases I wondered why the state was in the business of protecting inheritances for families who turned to Medicaid for their parents’ long-term care.