- Age-adjusted deaths from cold are ten times greater than deaths from heat.
- The first Generalist Medical AI system is out.
- Nate Silver on left-wing bias in the media.
- Is there anything wrong with having AI romantic partners? Apparently, yes.
- During the Covid pandemic, some hospital ICUs were overloaded, while neighboring hospitals had excess capacity. Worst victims of the lack of market clearing mechanisms: Medicaid enrollees and Blacks.
Category: News and Events
Are Asylums the Answer for Mentally Ill Homeless?
The homeless population is reaching epic proportions in high-cost cities and is glowing in places where homelessness was never as prevalent. Although the reasons are many, the homeless are poor, often have uncontrolled substance abuse disorders or suffer from mental illness. Often the homeless have all the above. High rents exacerbate the above problems.
On an average night, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, close to 600,000 people in the country will be homeless—a figure seen by many as an undercount. More than 40% will be “unsheltered,” or “living in places not suitable for human habitation,” and about 20% will be dealing with severe mental illness.
Tuesday Links
- George W. Bush’s program to combat AIDS in Africa has saved as many as 25 million lives — more lives than any other US government policy in the 21st century.
- Sunday was the 58th birthday of Medicare and Medicaid. The cost of Medicare has grown from $10 billion in its first year to nearly $750 billion last year. Taxpayers spend nearly $730 billion a year on Medicaid, up from under $1 billion at its inception.
- Chip Kahn and a whole slew of hospital affiliated authors: If value based purchasing doesn’t work, it’s not our fault.
- The cost of medical privacy: The original Privacy Rule from 2000 is 419 pages of dense legalese. This is in addition to revisions to the rule from 2002 (93 pages), 2013 (137 pages), 2014 (27 pages), and 2016 (15 pages).
- Over the last few years, the rate of death from Covid for the unvaccinated has been between 300% and 900% higher than for the vaccinated.
- Mental health problems diminish with income HT: Tyler
- Stress really can cause your hair to fall out. (NYT)
- Some patients are paying as much as $100,000 a year for unproven ways to live longer. (WSJ)
New York Times: Fake Science Used to Promote Many Heath Products
Whether you’re in the grocery store aisle, drugstore aisle, flipping through the pages of a lifestyle magazine or perusing Amazon, health products are everywhere. Too many of their claims are based on bogus science, pseudoscience, psychobabble or good old-fashioned snake oil. Often the names and claims sound scientific but too often are not. A new term to describe fake scientific claims is “scienceploitation”.