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The Goodman Institute Health Blog

Category: Single-Payer/Medicare-for-All

Monday Links

Posted on July 11, 2022July 25, 2022 by John C. Goodman
  • 7 Monkeypox questions answered. It doesn’t look good for sexually active gay men, and vaccine production is at a trickle.
  • California is going to make its own insulin.
  • Mini “Build Back Better” bill to cost $1 trillion. “It’s better than nothing,” said one progressive.
  • Study: giving people money doesn’t make them better off.  “The data are most consistent with the notion that receiving some but not enough money made participants’ needs—and the gap between their resources and needs—more salient, which in turn generated feelings of distress.”
  • Biden’s Executive Order on Abortion: “Nothing in his executive order will fundamentally change the everyday lives of poor women in a red state,” Georgetown University health law professor Lawrence Gostin told Vox.
  • David Henderson: Abortion in Canada is rationed by waiting.
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Big Pharma Blames Hospitals and PBMs for High Drug Prices

Posted on July 7, 2022 by Devon Herrick

Adam Fein at Drug Channels pointed me to a June 2022 report from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) on the price of drugs. The report is full of tidbits on drug spending. For example, the report states that prescription drug spending represents only 14% of health care expenditures. It is true that drugs are the best value in health care (especially over-the-counter drugs but that was not in the report). While it is true that drugs tend to be a better value than, say hospitals, not all drugs are of equal value. (That too was not in the report.)

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The Most Rapid Change in Family Structure in Human History

Posted on May 11, 2022 by John C. Goodman

This is David Brooks:

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

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Why the Markup on a $50,000 Knee Surgery is 500%

Posted on May 5, 2022 by Devon Herrick

Few hospitals in the United States have any idea what their costs are to perform various surgeries. The second most common surgery in U.S. hospitals after those related to childbirth is knee replacement. The price is more than $50,000 at Gundersen Health System’s hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin.  The facility has been systematically raising the price of knee surgery about 3% every year. None of administrators had any idea how much was profit and how much was the cost of nursing care, labor, overhead, supplies, etc. Gundersen, like most U.S. hospitals, didn’t know the cost because they do not face still competition and are not competing on price. Unlike most U.S. hospitals, however, Gundersen set out to find out its cost.

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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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