- In just eight years, nearly 78 million Medicare beneficiaries will face an automatic 11% payment cut in their hospital insurance benefits.
- GOP bill would prohibit the use of quality-adjusted-life-year (QALY) and similar measures for health insurance coverage and payment determinations.
- Related concept: The “value of a statistical life” appears to vary by income. In essence, being wealthier equates to being more willing to buy what might make one “healthier.”
- Reason magazine investigation: woman in federal prison dies of medical neglect.
Category: Saturday Links
Saturday Links
- Patriotic Millionaires call for a 90% top income tax rate, but refuse to pay that much themselves.
- Studies are finally coming out about the adverse effects of COVID vaccines.
- Study: Screen time and suicide among kids are connected.
- White House plans to provide free covid vaccinations to the uninsured.
- Moderna and IBM to make new vaccines using quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
- Study: Although Medicaid pays for contraception, age-adjusted rates of most or moderately effective contraceptive use among Medicaid beneficiaries vary almost fourfold across US counties and rates of long-lasting, reversible contraception (e.g., IUD) vary nearly tenfold.
Saturday Links
- Letting nurses do more stuff is good for patients.
- 434 economists (including yours truly) criticize the Biden budget.
- Is the Food Stamp program contributing to America’s poor health?
- Biden: DACA kids should get free health care from Medicaid, CHIP and the ACA exchanges. Won’t that encourage more DACA kids?
- The FDA approves some drugs other nations don’t want.
- Study: After St. George’s Hospital in The UK ended its mask mandate for staff and visitors for some, but not all, wards, there was no difference in Covid infections between the two settings.
- Meta analysis of 2,168 studies finds that wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic led to negative health consequences, including itching, headaches, and restriction of oxygen.
Saturday Links
- How parents decide when and how to punish their children. It’s similar to the principles of criminal law.
- Reducing carbon emissions through subsidies (the Biden/IRA approach) costs 6 times as much as a carbon tax.
- Why the Medicare Trustees report is too optimistic: It assumes the birth rate in the long-run will increase to a nearly full native replacement of 2.0 children per woman, despite a steady and now long-standing fall to around 1.65.
- 80% of new treatments in the pharmaceutical pipeline originate in the U.S. That’s been a Godsend for the more than 55 million people living with dementia across the globe, the tens of millions worldwide who will receive a cancer diagnosis, and the more than 38 million people living with HIV.
- David Henderson’s proposal to cut Medicare spending: offer beneficiaries cash instead of a benefit in kind. I would offer everyone approved for elective surgery half the DRG rate in cash as an alternative. This is actually how some European countries handle long term care.