- 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.
Category: Saturday Links
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.
Saturday Links
- Did you know that commercial airlines have to obey a speed limit?
- Digital therapies that sought FDA approval are expensive and in a regulatory morass. Is there a non-FDA approach that is possible?
- How worried should we be over a drug resistant fungus?
- Views on AI’s risk to humanity.
- Scott Sumner’s take: the worry is not that an intelligent AI will destroy the world. It’s that a depressed person will use AI to destroy the world.
- A different view of the Waco tragedy – one more sympathetic to the Branch Davidians.
Saturday Links
- Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now restricted from issuing mask mandates and school closures.
- The 42% of adults who are obese costs the US health system 173 billion dollars a year, including cardiovascular disease, cancers, depression, breathing issues, and skeletal issues. Despite this, 98 percent of Americans do not receive treatment for their obesity.
- Greg Mankiw: “The Biden administration faces a trilemma: They would like to (1) increase spending on programs they consider important, (2) not raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year, and (3) put fiscal policy on a sustainable path. But the stark reality is that they can have only 2 out of the 3.”
- A defense of Vinyl chloride. (despite the dead fish)
- IRS: 42K federal workers are cheating on their taxes.