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Category: News and Events

Covid-Chasing Travel Nurse Bubble Burst but Not Going Away

Posted on July 28, 2022 by Devon Herrick

The Wall Street Journal had an article about the falling use of travel nurses. At the peak of the pandemic nurses willing to travel from one hot spot to another could sometimes earn as much as $10,000 per week.

Hospitals across the U.S. have had to dig deep to treat patients during the Covid-19 pandemic as some of the most lucrative parts of their business, elective surgeries, were constantly postponed. The flip side of that has been a bonanza for the companies that helped them keep staffing levels adequate as well as for the brave and flexible people who filled those positions.

By contrast, nurses who stayed in their regular jobs often found themselves working mandatory overtime in understaffed hospitals filled to the brim with Covid patients. When they complained about too many hours, low wages and a lack of personal protection equipment their complaints were often dismissed.

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Thursday Links

Posted on July 28, 2022 by John C. Goodman
  • In Fixing Food, Richard A. Williams, a 30-year cost-benefit analyst at the FDA, says the agency isn’t protecting the public. Book review here.
  • John Cochrane video on free market health insurance.
  • Nearly 5 million people are paying no premium at all for their Obamacare Insurance. (WSJ) But if they had the cash, almost all of them would do something else with it.
  • Next big thing in cannabis: a gentler high that offers relaxation and pain relief without the anxiety or fuzzy-headedness of regular weed.
  • In Vancouver, you can get a fentanyl high for free – courtesy of the Canadian public health system.
  • Kim Bellard at The Health Care Blog admits he has been wrong. About his belief in managed care? Or, managed competition? Or, his failure to appreciate the power of markets? Or, patient power? No. None of these. He was wrong because he hoped people would care more about health and more about patients than profits. Not exactly the mea culpa we were looking for.
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Obesity is Skyrocketing (So is the variety of snack foods)

Posted on July 27, 2022 by Devon Herrick

USA Today has just published a series of articles on obesity  in America, saying:

More than 4 in 10 Americans now fit the medical definition for having obesity, putting them at risk for serious health problems, including diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancer. The pandemic increased the stakes. In its first year, nearly one-third of severe COVID-19 cases were blamed on excess weight.

USA Today… spoke with more than 50 experts – in nutrition, endocrinology, psychology, exercise physiology and neuroscience – and people who are intimately familiar with the challenges of extra pounds.

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Wednesday Links

Posted on July 27, 2022July 26, 2022 by John C. Goodman
  • More on America’s unusually short life expectancy: the absolute gap is mostly overdoses, homicides, and car accidents.
  • What’s wrong with BBB lite?
  • Should uncompensated house work (including child care) count as part of GDP? Peter Thiel vs. Arnold Kling.
  • David Henderson and Casey Mulligan: Why Biden is virtually engineering a recession.
  • Jason Shafrin on Grossman’s classic human capital model of the demand for health care.
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For many years, our health care blog was the only free enterprise health policy blog on the internet. Then, when the NCPA closed its doors, the health blog stopped as well.

During this five-year hiatus no one else has come forward to claim the space. So, my colleagues and I have decided to restart the blog in connection with the Goodman Institute. We invite you and others to use this forum to share your views.

John C. Goodman,

Visit www.goodmaninstitute.org

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