- 50 years of US industrial policy. For those of you who think it is something new.
- Getting the priorities right: The Senate Budget Committee this session has held a total of 29 hearings, 15 of which were on climate and just 3 on the budget.
- Burgess: Under a “warranty approach” drug companies would refund a pre-negotiated amount of the drug’s price to the payor and patient if the latter’s health does not improve as expected. Under a “cost sharing approach,” the high upfront cost of gene therapy would be shared by subsequent insurers after the treatment succeeds.
- 10,000 commandments: Federal regulatory burdens cost $1.94 trillion per year, or $14,500 per household.
- Argument: drug shortages are caused by monopolistic middlemen. (Surely not the whole of the story.)
Category: Thursday Links
Thursday Links
- Studies: hugs are good for you.
- Regular mammograms identify 87% of breast cancers. AI programs can boost that detection rate by 20%, and the cost is $40 – $100 extra. Is that worth it?
- Study: There is no evidence that buying and then forgiving medical debts that are in collections improved on average beneficiaries’ finances, access to credit, or their physical or mental health. People were even less likely to pay existing medical bills after their debt was eliminated.
- PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down for thousands of years, if at all. Turns out, they are everywhere, including our drinking water, and that could be hazardous to our health.
- The FDA has approved a test that predicts a patient’s risk of becoming addicted to opioids. Why is that controversial?
Thursday Links
- The latest on Fentanyl deaths.
- “Using published data from the Netherlands and Belgium, where medically assisted death is legal, we estimated that…Medical assistance in dying could reduce annual health care spending across Canada by between $34.7 million and $138.8 million, exceeding the $1.5–$14.8 million in direct costs associated with its implementation.”
- Why are we still funding the WHO?
- Why we need “right to try”: family had to travel to Italy for life saving drug for their daughter that the FDA was slow to approve in the US.
- More than half of eligible physicians received a payment from a pharmaceutical drug or device maker over 10 years.
Thursday Links
- Obamacare is making health insurance companies rich.
- Aaron Carroll reviews health care systems around the world in 10 minutes. Pretty good on the market-based systems in Switzerland and Singapore and the public/private systems in Australia and New Zealand. But when it comes to the UK and Canada, he fails to mention the extraordinary waits and health care rationing.
- Federal health bureaucracies operated by doctors and lawyers regulate about a fifth of our economy and a quarter of the federal budget – jobs that need the insights of economists.
- When the cost of prevention is included, the total loss from Covid was lower in the U.S. than in the EU.
- The CBO estimated that (Obamacare) exchange enrollees would cost federal taxpayers $6,850 each by 2021. The reality: $20,739, or over three times as much.