- Why is Biden’s pension twice the size of Obama’s?
- Poland is an economic recovery model for Venezuela.
- Venezuela’s stock market is now up +73% since President Maduro was captured.
- Why we can’t grow our way out of the Medicare-driven debt crisis.
- The only people who should take an aspirin a day are people with a history of cardiovascular disease. (NYT)
Category: Thursday Links
Thursday Links – 1 January 2026
- Medical breakthroughs in 2025.
- Canadian health care: Since 2015, indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic collapse in health and well-being: on average almost a full decade of lost life expectancy.
- Study: Children’s myopia risk linked to smartphone use.
- Diets high in ultra processed food may be linked to problems across almost every major organ system.
- Since Covid, the USA has grown much faster than all our major competitors.
Thursday Links
- “Whether we pay through taxes, out-of-pocket outlays, lower cash wages, or government borrowing, we spend approximately 22 percent of personal income on health care.”
- Cancer-detecting blood tests: the cancers they don’t find exceed the number that they do find. (NYT)
- Since 1992, the diagnoses of eight cancers has doubled in the United States in patients under age 50. But finding more cancer isn’t necessarily a good thing.
- Why there is a shortage of primary care doctors: compared to the specialties: low pay, excess paperwork and medical education hurdles.
- Does expanding Medicaid reduce crime? No.
Thursday Links
- In Madagascar, lemurs are a delicacy – to dine on.
- Ultra processed foods are bad for the stomach and the intestines. (NYT)
- There are 3.2 million home health aides and personal care aides on the job last year, up from 1.4 million a decade ago – one-third of them are immigrants.
- What Britain will pay for drugs: about $26,500 to $40,000 for a healthy year of life saved.
- Why Social Security and Medicare need immigrants:
If all immigration were stopped, America’s working-age population would fall by about 5% through 2035 … while the number of seniors older than 80 — who generate much larger bills per person for Medicare … — will double.